Jeffrey Wilson over at Laptop Magazine has given up his notebook computer and replaced it with an Eee PC 4G Surf. Each day, he’s writing about his experiences with it. Currently, he’s up to day 3. Here’s a quick summary:
- Day 1: Good first impressions. Men labeled it “cool” and women labeled it “cute.” Perfect for travel. Some difficulty getting used to small size. Some difficulty with website formatting on the small resolution screen.
- Day 2: Mentions our forum, helped him fix wireless problem (cool!). Uses external hard drive for media. Fun reactions from people while out and about.
- Day 3: Begins using a keyboard for typing long articles.
You can click each day to read the full stories.
I think what’s great about his experience is that it’s very similar to most of ours (or at least mine!). I had the same positive first impressions, a little difficulty at first, and am now fully used to the small size and getting maximum space for web pages to display. We’ve ALL had the reactions from people while out and about, confused as to what the Eee PC is- but everybody is genuinely interested in it and wants to know more about it.
I’ve also become used to typing these news posts via my Eee PC- the keyboard is now plenty big for me. I forget that it’s smaller than my other laptop’s keyboard. More importantly WordPress’ admin panel shows up well on the Eee PC’s screen. Actually, this site as a whole does, but that’s the intention. Most websites do show up fine if you bring Firefox to full screen.
So how about you all? Anything give you trouble at first that you’ve now solved or become used to?
{ 26 comments }
Sorry to say that here, but I will not give up my other machines for EEE
It’s a pet to me, a little sweetheart to play with and taking it out for a walk once awhile
It definitely sounds like my experience, this website has been great for helping me solve problems, wireless etc. While having it out I know one friend who has purchased one and another, a teacher, who is likely going to buy one. Great price for what you get.
So far, pretty good. Biggest problem has been installing the 1GB of RAM on my 4G Surf, but found great directions here.
No problems networking at all yet at home or at various hotspots. Hooked up USB Keyboard, mouse, and my LCD monitor the other day and it worked great.
Love this little guy. So glad I bought it.
I am hooked since November when I got the machine. It’s my companion on every trip and it even slides under the seat of my motorbike
As everyone I had a hard start with the small keyboard, but one week was enough for my clumsy fingers to get around. Great stuff from ASUS!
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4G black – 1 GB RAM – Xandros Full Desktop – 4 GB SDHC as /home
Bought it to use for school work.
Great and easy to carry around.
Love it.
I’ve had my Eee for a little over a week and it’s great. I have not abandoned my slightly larger laptop and probably won’t. There are some apps I use that I am not willing to give up while at home. However, when traveling I will take my Eee with data on the SD card and be just fine. There is one issue I have not yet resolved. I remapped the keyboard and built a script that runs when the system is booted up. I recently tried Advanced Mode and found that the script does not run when the system switches into that mode. So far, no answers from the user forum. i can live with the screen and have become almost as fast touch typing on the Eee as on my larger laptop. Way to go, Asus!
I gave up a relatively new Dell notebook for the EEE but no regrets here. Sure, it could do with a bigger screen, and built-in bt, but hey I can’t complain for the price. Enough for daily light use, and it can even handle some old school games!
I have a Asus W3J, awesome laptop capable of playing most current gen games. I hated carrying it though. Although it was lightweight for a gaming laptop 14″ it was still a hassle to carry around. Enter Asus EeePC… I can’t play the same games but I can do everything I did on the W3J with this tiny machine. (XP installed) The W3J has been reduced to a desktop pc since I got my EeePC.
Typing on it took awhile to get use to but you get use to it if you have huge hands.
I had this baby for almost 2 months now and I post about it a few time on eeeuser. And, I still love this thing!
It’s light and portable. Great for quick surfing, playing games, watching iTunes podcast (no ipod? No problemo, download and watch on your Eee pc!) movies etc. Even the charger is small like a phone charger. A friend of mine wanted to sell me his Acer laptop which has better spec then the Eee but I declined. I’ll rather stick with my Eee. Hehe!
Even the screen doesn’t really bother me a bit. In fact, I was like wow! The first time it was shown to me. I guess maybe I’m used to a PDA screen so the Eee screen seems bigger and comfortable to me. Even at home I prefer to use it to surf or do other ‘stuff’ although I have a desktop pc.
In all I’m extremely satisfied!
Part four is out. More eeeuser homage
My experiences with the EEE were similar in terms of the reactions it got from work colleagues (most of the women I work with thought it was cute). However, I couldn’t take the step of giving up my IBM T42 for it (because I’m a user who demands high resolution LCDs on his laptops), and I ended up selling it. But it is definitely a worthwhile product and with support sites like this, users can definitely tailor the EEE to their particular needs.
Google Calendar was tough to use so I modified a GreaseMonkey script to fully maximize it with an F12 Toggle:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/21376
Makes it SO much easier to edit events.
It surprises me every day but I’ve been able to survive and thrive without my main machine – and it wasn’t a concious decision on my part, it just became more and more natural that there wasn’t a task that needed me to turn to it (a 17″ ‘desktop-replacement’ Dell laptop).
I’m still running a black EEE 4G (from the flikr photo set highlighted on the front of this site last year) and still on the default Xandros installation and there’s not a file I’ve not been able to open and not a task I had where I had to go get my main computer. It’s incredible, really.
In three months there is just one website it couldn’t handle, it boots up when I get home from work before I’ve had time to even think about getting impatient, it goes to all rooms happily to be on call when I need it, plays all media and streaming I’ve given it. It’s flawless.
At this point in time my Dell has been shelved and I haven’t had cause to open it up. It was not a concious decision to mothball it but I just haven’t needed it. Even the keyboard (like the OP says) is now fine for all typing. Fantastic purchase, I just haven’t looked back.
i stopped lugging my dell xps for my windows xp sp2 loaded, ms office 2k3 pro and ms project loaded eee pc. jumping from meeting to meeting from one venue to another, the eee pc has proved that this MID can also work as a UMPC. once i got used to the keyboard it was an excellent note taking device.
i’ve determined that a part of my business day revolves mainly on email, office apps and project. the part where i need my 30″ screen and quad core is when i’m working at home.
i cant give up my other machines but the eee pc has been my road companion replacing my dell xps. i’ve also loaded slingbox’s sling media and pc anywhere. so if i ever needed to process something intensive, i connect to my desktop via the eee pc. albeit its a little difficult to view anything larger than 1440×900 on this 800×480 screen
but i sure am glad that i didnt buy that fujitsu 5.6″ screen UMPC for $1K.
I’m a developer so this little machine will probably never be able to replace my Thinkpad. The screen space and keyboard are the limiting factor there. So if I’m not coding, I’m on my eee.
I really liked the default OS. I liked it a lot. Then I installed Slackware just for giggles. Worked OK after a lot of work. Now I’ve got XP on it and I love it. XP works very, very well on this thing.
I used to think that my 4-pound Lifebook was lightweight, but now… I rarely take it with me, relying on my EEE instead (black, 1 Gig, 16 Gig SDHC card, full desktop Xandros). I can live with the keyboard and Open Office gives me everything I need, but boy, do I miss Outlook….
Chris
With a nlite XP + apps undr 600mb, and under 20sec boot, it’s a killer system. I watch divx streams, listen to music, surf, game a bit, and use it for ebooks.. I prefer Opera 9 to firefox, it has more keyboard shortcuts, is a bit faster with a smaller footprint. Fullscreen gives a true full-screen experience with no toolbars.. With the taskbar hidden, it is pure html for me.
I have mine going on two months now, I love it! I use it for doing all my bookkeeping and for reading PDFs and for watching tutorials. I added 2 gig of ram from newegg for 48 bucks, I took an old 16gig thumbdrive and added it to the inside, and I bought a 16gig sd card from newegg for about 40 bucks after rebate that I keep in all the time.
At first I installed eeexubuntu and it read the full 2 gig of ram right off.
But just recently I decided to reinstall the default xandros advanced mode just because I’m still a linux newbie and my eeepc is getting more and more important to me. It’s not a toy anymore so I want everything to work well. I enjoy the quick boot of the xandros install, but now I have to figure out how to get it to see the full 2gig of ram.
I love my eeepc. I just throw it in my coat pocket and take it everywhere. I pull it out on the train and people get so curious about it when they see it. Most of my friends think it’s one of the extremely expensive umpcs when they first see it. Then when I tell them how much it costs, they get blown away. I’m so glad I got this instead of the kindle.
Now I’m looking forward to the 10 inch screen version. When that comes out I will be so happy.
I have it for a week now, and its just great. Never had any troubles, everything worked great from day one. Ok, the size of the keyboard is a bit of a problem, i just happen to have rather large hands – but i m getting used to it. With 3g internet i am able to work online from everywhere now.So, what can i say? Just perfect, a real breakthrough in mobile computing!
Used it for about a week now. Have used tiny notebooks and pimped PDAs in the past for note options etc during undergrad. All I can say, I wish I had this in undergrad. Cheap, perfect for lectures, tutorials and studying, plus undergrad=cheap. Get a cheap desktop for home and use this for the library and lecture hall – isn’t it cheaper than the essential college device, an iPod? Might not be the laptop replacement for everyone, but for it’ll work for some people, and it’s only a cheap gamble to try it out (relatively).
I actually teach at a university, and I’m just about to start a semester using the Eeepc as my primary machine. I have a keyboard, mouse and 19 inch monitor on my desk so that usability shouldn’t be a problem. I went back to my old computer and found that I tend to accumulate about 4gig worth of data per semester, so the 8gig SD card I have in it should do the job.
My two main fears are data loss and incompatibility. To deal with the former I’ve got a new WD portable harddrive that I will use for frequent backups, and from what I understand the SSD should be at least as reliable as the drives I’ve been using for years. As for the latter, only time will tell. My university’s security has already stopped Firefox from working (no .pac setting for proxy) but Opera works fine.
I’ll probably keep you posted on how the experiment is going!
It’ll definately replace my current desktop completly… I already have very few things on it and I store all my data on a server already so this is just ideal… I also plan on buying a few more for various other purposes(i.e. firewall, dedictaed music box and such).
Of course I’ll be installing a highly customized and optimised setup for it with both an eee easy mode look a like when mobile and a proper desktop when a proper display is hooked up…
I’ve had my 4g for two weeks now, installed nlited xp without any problem. Even typing with norwegian keyboardsetting works great, I just have to remember which ones are æ, ø and å, and how the symbols are replaced. If I just don’t think about it, I hit the right key automatically. Just installed 1GB ram and 8GB sdhc, and now it’s ready for some action. Hardly notice it when I’m carrying it around, and use it as a kind of mini mac in my office, where I have it hooked up to a monitor and input periferals.
I have, though, noticed that the CPU hits the roof from just refreshing a large website, but not long enough for it to annoy me. What does annoy me a bit is the power consumption in standby. Although it boots in half a minute, it would be nice to just open it up and -poof- have it there. Having to press the powerbutton to get it out of standby seems like unneccessary fingermovement. Also, I had some pain trying to use programs that would not resize, so the panels would be bigger than the screen. Found lots of ways to zoom in, but none to zoom out…
Other than that it’s a sweet device, well worth the extra $200 for shipment and norwegian taxes.
Kimbo – for those 200$ you could buy cheap roundtrip flight to Riga, Latvia, buy Asus EEE there, drink couple of local beers, have nice food, unpack your new EEE and fly back. Nobody would charge you any shippement and import taxes and you would spend nice time for that money
I just got back from my first business trip using my EEE. It worked very well throughout the trip – Wifi in the hotel was flawless.
One nice thing was its effect on airport security. Instead of the usual dour guards, they were warm and friendly. I took it out of my bag and the fellow said “it’s ok, sir, we just need laptops taken out.” When I told him it WAS a laptop, he was floored. He yelled to the fellow working the xray machine “Murray! Wait to till you see how small this laptop is!”.
My most pleasant passed through airport security in YEARS.
你的 EeePC 900/901 真的有網路硬碟嗎？ http://blog.udn.com/mikefly/2320844
(Where is your EeePC 900/901 Eee Storage?)
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