Asus recently released their Asus Eee. This is a tiny Celeron based laptop running a Xandros Linux variant and it retails for $600nzd locally at Dick Smith. Detailed specifications are on the Asus site.
I’ve been after a cheap secondary PC for a while so I grabbed a 4Gb Eee the day they were released in New Zealand. They’re excellent value for the price and the Eee is the first laptop I’ve owned that is light enough to be carried to and from work every day in my satchel.
Hopefully this shot of the closed Eee with 40k Basilisk for scale indicates how small it is. The only downside is the ridiculous brand name which sounds like the noise enraged shrews make before they attack – the laptop itself is silent.
I’ve been spending so much time on the thing that recently my wife commented that ‘we’ve got a real PC, why are you using that toy?’ while I was coding on the Eee in our home office, next to our desktop system.
It’s also occurred to me that the Eee is an excellent tool for war gaming as well. The majority of my gaming rule books are in PDF form, either because they’re free downloads (like GW’s Specialist Games), they’ve been purchased that way (like .45 Adventure) or they’ve been acquired from less savory sources.
The Eee out of the box includes Firefox and Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 so you can view HTML and PDF documents with ease. While it only has 4GB of SSD storage on board, it has three USB ports so you can attach a removable HDD to it packed with war gaming goodness. I anticipate it’ll become a valuable tool for referencing rules out in the garage while gaming.
It also sports an MP3 player and a passable set of speakers, although I haven’t tried playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on it yet…
Wow! I didn’t realize they still sold 4GB PC’s. That looks amazingly compact.
Apart from the screen which really looks tiny and low-res, I think you made a fine purchase here. It’s also the perfect size as a companion on the painting desk :)
Gerrie, the screen is 7″ at 800 x 400. It’s quite small I’ll grant you, but being an LCD is very crisp and clear.
Possibly the example document in my photo was a poor choice – because it’s a low res scan of a photocopied set of Linka building instructions!
That’s crazy.
I used to carry my macbook around with me. It wasn’t too bad, I’d have it in my bag while working(i do bicycle messenger work).
Well, it was fine until I got hit by a car and it managed to break my lcd screen and cd rom.
hah.
My freind travels a lot so he bought a small pc like that… but his was like $1500 and is like a normal new pc, just tiny.
Ouch! That sounds painful…I’d love to ride a bike to/from work but haven’t worked up the courage…
Yes, the Sony Vaio range of tiny little laptops is lovely, but frightening expensive. Around $2,500nzd locally. For that price I could buy four of these tiny little laptops!
They’re not as powerful as the Vaios of course…but they surf the web and email just fine. Plus I can happily do development work on them too (since that usually just requires a half decent text editor like Geany) at at roughly the weight of a thick paperback book they’re completely portable.
$2500 will get you a 17″wide screen laptop why bike for your exercise when you can lift weights… its much easier to ballance on your knees due to the weight at full sized keyboard width
Actually, I got a 60GB, 17″ widescreen laptop with a full keyboard 8 months ago for $800. It was a HP recertified, but it’s been great for me.
my new laptop is hp AMD 17″ widescreen, full keyboard. It’s ok. I’ve had to send it back in to fix the casing for the LCD as it started splitting at one of the hinges.
The weight of the screen eventually causes this problem.
Hah, I bike for work and to get around, in Portland, Oregon you don’t really need a car, so.. it’s 10-20 minutes to pretty much anywhere by bike.
Anyway, I may look into one of these new ones. I need something small to take with me on road trips.
Hahahah! Josh,
I just started having the EXACT same problem you are having. The front pannel broke, so the hinge is acting weird. I tried ordering the part, but they are out of stock….
lol
Those are dark predictions, Mine is a HP Comaq nx9420 (intel inside). Any tips to avoid it?
Not sure. I often use mine sitting on the couch, so I assume this could be a problem.. constant moving around that causes the weight of the screen to shift back and forth.
HP fixed it for free and said they could replicate the problem, so… Hopefully they reinforced it or something. I’ve yet to have any problems with it.
Yea… I don’t think there’s really anything you can do about it… It’s just the screw holding the black “border” on the bottom left of your screen (near the locking mechanism) broke through the plastic…
Didn’t do any damage to the actual computer.. just that front casing…
(Boy, that is hard to explain…)