Me and My eeePC
I count Pam Bliss among my great pals and listen closely when she is won over by technology of any sort. If you know Pam, you know what I mean; she's wary about stuff like that. So when she raved recently about her new eeePC from Asus, I took notice.
When convention time rolled around this year I found myself wincing at the thought of carting around my laptop and the possibility of an extended search that would include powering the monster up and even the possibility of TSA wanting to keep it for further study. All just so's I can blog from MoCCA? There had to be a better way. Indeed there was.
The eeePC's size surprises you the way tiny dogs amaze you by being that little. It looks for all the world like a Fisher-Price Laptop might.
Well, maybe not. This gadget is actually larger than an eeePC (true). And like the laptop above, when you turn on the eeePC it works. It already has eveything you need to be out and about in a wireless world. I got the 4G Surf and installed GIMP on it, but that's about all the tinkering I've done.
Since it's got a solid state hard drive, when it's off it can take some thumps and bumps with no trouble. The TSA screeners barely looked at it, and I got a few stares from the line behind me when (as per TSA policy) I put the little eeePC in its own bin for the x-ray. The tiny keyboard requires some carful typing; I cannot master hitting the spacebar on it just yet, as I am more of a spacebar stroker than a spacebar hitter. Oh, and you can double your hard-drive size with a flash drive.
When I caught up with Pam at Wizard World Chicago, I told her of the effect her blog posts on the eeePC had on me. When she started quizzing me on my model and mods I knew she'd really been hooked on her eeePC. When Pam goes for something, she finds out everything there is to know about it.
Even my 72 year old mother, who is interested in learning about the internet and email and such said "That thing looks like a toy! I bet I could learn on that!" There's your slogan--"eeePC; we don't intimidate the elderly" unlike some manufacturers we could name (Alienware, I'm looking at you). She may even get one of her own; goodness knows getting mine away from me can be a trick.
Asus is starting to put out bigger and badder eeePCs, and that seems to me to be missing the point. A relatively inexpensive laptop with a small form-factor doesn't need to be a monster. Nobody's going to get one to play GTA 4. Nobody in their right mind would want to do Photoshop-level graphics on one. I have a feeling this will be a small window, and that the 2 and 4 gig models will disappear entirely in favor of the 80 gig monsters. I'm very happy with my tiny on the go 4G Surf, thanks.
And don't get the one with Windows XP on it. That's like peeing in the sink.
When convention time rolled around this year I found myself wincing at the thought of carting around my laptop and the possibility of an extended search that would include powering the monster up and even the possibility of TSA wanting to keep it for further study. All just so's I can blog from MoCCA? There had to be a better way. Indeed there was.
The eeePC's size surprises you the way tiny dogs amaze you by being that little. It looks for all the world like a Fisher-Price Laptop might.
Well, maybe not. This gadget is actually larger than an eeePC (true). And like the laptop above, when you turn on the eeePC it works. It already has eveything you need to be out and about in a wireless world. I got the 4G Surf and installed GIMP on it, but that's about all the tinkering I've done.
Since it's got a solid state hard drive, when it's off it can take some thumps and bumps with no trouble. The TSA screeners barely looked at it, and I got a few stares from the line behind me when (as per TSA policy) I put the little eeePC in its own bin for the x-ray. The tiny keyboard requires some carful typing; I cannot master hitting the spacebar on it just yet, as I am more of a spacebar stroker than a spacebar hitter. Oh, and you can double your hard-drive size with a flash drive.
When I caught up with Pam at Wizard World Chicago, I told her of the effect her blog posts on the eeePC had on me. When she started quizzing me on my model and mods I knew she'd really been hooked on her eeePC. When Pam goes for something, she finds out everything there is to know about it.
Even my 72 year old mother, who is interested in learning about the internet and email and such said "That thing looks like a toy! I bet I could learn on that!" There's your slogan--"eeePC; we don't intimidate the elderly" unlike some manufacturers we could name (Alienware, I'm looking at you). She may even get one of her own; goodness knows getting mine away from me can be a trick.
Asus is starting to put out bigger and badder eeePCs, and that seems to me to be missing the point. A relatively inexpensive laptop with a small form-factor doesn't need to be a monster. Nobody's going to get one to play GTA 4. Nobody in their right mind would want to do Photoshop-level graphics on one. I have a feeling this will be a small window, and that the 2 and 4 gig models will disappear entirely in favor of the 80 gig monsters. I'm very happy with my tiny on the go 4G Surf, thanks.
And don't get the one with Windows XP on it. That's like peeing in the sink.
posted by John Ira Thomas at
2:22 PM
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