2 Days with an Asus Eee PC Netbook
Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 7:48PM 
Within a day or two of wanting a netbook I found myself diligently pursuing a purchase. I really wanted a Linux OS to play with and I loved the idea of how portable and convenient they were. I found my daughter on my 17 inch Mac Book Pro more often and my wife surfing the web on my workstation. I have managed to conjure every excuse needed to make a purchase. With the prices at $350 and a full stock at Best Buy how could I resist.
Un-boxing took place in the VW out side the big yellow ticket. Unsure why I was sweating I proceeded to fire this little puppy up. On first impression I thought the plastic looked a little cheap but quickly overlooked for a taste of this little buggers insides. Popped the battery in and it booted right out of the box. Managing a new fangled OS wasn't to difficult since it was so perfectly laid out. I was impressed with the software offerings and how it had all the shortcuts ready to go for cloud computing. Setting it up on Wi-Fi was a breeze but seemed very slow. Before I knew it I was waiting often for easy operations and finding the track-pad to be selecting things I did not want to select. It seemed to be possessed with a ghost double-clicker. A second downfall I found was the 4GB flash drive. I was actually looking forward to not having a lot of storage and being forced to be a minimalist. When I took a look at the 4GB SSD I found it to be full. It had 400Mb available and that's out of the box. This had me worried. I did want to use it for some Ruby programming and maybe put a few things on the disk and I quickly realized the 400 MB available just wouldn't be enough for me.
My take on this experience was I got what I paid for and I thought I wanted that. However, after using power computers for so long, even surfing the web has a minimum spec that I'm use to and watching flash/H.264 videos even on Hulu proved to be a little tough on the Intel Atom processor.
The next day I drove back to Best Buy and parked under the big yellow ticket, blue bag in hand I returned my little Eee Pc. It cost me about $50 restocking fee even though I told them the drive was already full and had zero room for installing anything. I didn't really argue as I felt the restocking fee was the price I pay for experimenting but $50 seems a little steep for a $350 item. Maybe this review will help you make a decision and not lose your money.
Overall, I'm pretty sure it hits the mark on what it is but it's just to slow and doesn't have enough storage for me. For now, if I want slow I will use my iPhone. And hold off on that next impulse purchase.
Here's a link to the Asus Eee PC
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Reader Comments (2)
shoulda gone with the aspire one with 160 gb hd and 1.6 atom processor. Demoed one at tigerdirect and didn't seem to have any issues navigating through programs and such. In fact, it responded quicker than my centrino 1.7 ghz laptop. I'm looking to pick one up myself since I spent a good 10 minutes just typing in tigerdirect to make sure the keyboard wasn't too small. Seems like the keyboard on the aspire one is just right for a netbook. Also, a law school buddy of mine has one and he seems to be pretty happy with it. I don't see how watching hulu.com would be a problem. Probably the problem is that you went with the 4 gb version (why would you do that, seriously). Especially with the price being almost the same nowadays, I can't imagine why you wouldn't just get the big hd, unless you're desperate for 20 sec boot times.
Hey thanks, I'll look at the Aspire again. Also saw the HP at Tiger USA. That's pretty nice but it comes with Vista which is getting a seriously bad rap. Was the Aspire a Linux?