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…