The Obligatory Eee Follow-up Post

I’ve had my ASUS Eee PC 4GB for about 4 days now. I’m absolutely infatuated with it – to the point that it impacted my productivity this week at work! In hindsight I’ve probably spent too much time with it, but that time has resulted in a little machine that is very useful to me and my responsibilities. So, I guess it pays off in the long run. (how’s that for rationalization?)

When I last wrote about this thing it was running the default Xandros Linux. While I liked the operating system, I have to say I found the “big buttons” approach rather “Tonka-like”… However, after just a little bit of poking around I learned about Advanced Mode and that resulted in something I really loved. Now I had a proper little desktop.

Next I tackled getting my Sprint 3G card working. While the kernel recompiles became a bit tedious, the instructions were great and I had no major issues.

Now that I could have network access from anywhere I needed to get a VPN connection working to get me into the office. We have an older Cisco Concentrator 3000 series device and, no matter how many how-to’s I tried, I just couldn’t get a reliable connection. It would connect and get an internal IP, but I couldn’t “see” into the office lan. No pings and routing was all horked up.

After a few hours of trying I threw in the towel and decided to install XP Pro on it instead. No VPN was a deal breaker and I knew I wouldn’t have any issues with that from Windows.

XP Configuration

Installing XP without an external USB CD drive adds a bit of a difficulty factor but with the help of nLite and yet another great Eeeuser.com wiki article, I was able to do it from a USB stick. (and there’s a decent nLite guide for Eee installs at that same wiki.)

I’m pleased to note that my “reduced” install of XP ran great with 512MB of RAM. Sure, I couldn’t open a ton of programs at once, but that’s not really an issue with the intended use of, for the most part, remote access. I’m even more pleased to mention that our marketing guy upgraded his Mac to 2GB sticks and one of his old 1GB sticks work just fine in the Eee.  Yep, I snagged a free memory upgrade along the way.

I’ve done a bit of XP optimizing (for the tiny SSD drive) and am happy with how well it runs. And heck, even after installing the apps I still have just shy of 2GB left. Keeping all my portable apps in my DropBox account really paid off in reducing the setup time on this.

I tossed in an old 512MB SD card for some “scratch” storage and I’ve configured the web browsers to use it for their caching. Dunno if that helps, but I figured it would reduce the amount of writes on the SSD drive and still give me some caching. And speaking of browsers, K-Meleon just rocks on this thing. Light and fast. However, now that I have 1GB ram I might install Firefox 3 on it too. I’d been avoiding it since it tends to use gobs of memory…

Hmm… let’s see, what else have I done to it?

I’m running something called AsTray that lets me change my resolution (on the fly) to as high as 1024×768. The default is 800×468 so that can be quite a jump. Comes in handy when I just need to get more on the screen (also means I have to carry my reading glasses with me at all times!).

I might give eeectl a look soon. I don’t really need to overclock this but it might be interesting to experiment…

Final Thoughts

I’m still on the fence as to if this is the machine I would’ve chosen. It is definitely smaller than what I had been initially considering — but it has really grown on me. I’ve spent the last few nights using it and have really come to appreciate how much functionality I can get from something this small.

A top contender in my earlier research had been the MSI Wind U100-432US(10” display with 1GB / 120 GB hard drive and a 6 cell battery). By coincidence, a friend at work got one the same day my Eee showed up. Going from 7 to 10” screens doesn’t seem overly dramatic but I definitely have lust for his keyboard. Noticeably bigger. On the downside, it is also noticeably heavier and larger when stacked up next to mine.

I think something in between the two sizes is where I’d be headed if I was going to go buy another right now. For instance, this Acer Aspire One 8.9-Inch Netbook is what I was looking at earlier today. Again, not that I’m ready to dump my Eee! Oh no, not at all, but the Acer is just a wee bit larger yet weighs just a couple tenths of a pound more – and has 2 more cells in the battery. I have to find one to touch and see if the keyboard is larger though.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Follow-up to Netbook Linux Adventures
2. From Eee to Acer to Aspire to Easy Peasy Linux
3. My Free Netbook Arrived Today
4. USB Bootable Linux for the Eee Netbook
5. Store Dropbox Data on a Removable Drive