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Sunday, April 19, 2009

Asus Eeepc with Eeebuntu

Middle son has an eeepc 701 that he generally gave up on because of the keyboard, which is too small, and he's a giant! But these things are fantastic for traveling! They used it all the time in France to book things. Now, he's going to take it to Uganda.

I've had such a bitchy time trying to spruce it up with a new operating system. Lots of failures. Just now I found eeebuntu, and it works great. The machine has lots of quirks, and this handles them all. Still, it's nasty to install a new operating system. I finally bought a usb cd machine to do it. You can supposedly format a bootable usb stick, but I never could get one working.

1 comment:

  1. Pros:
    1. Battery Life - It really is that good. I can get a real world value of 7.5 to 8 hours with the WLAN on under the power saving mode. I can't even see a difference with the performance when in this mode.
    2. LED-lit screen - I was expecting a basic screen that didn't look particularly great. I was surprised with the look of it, even at the low, netbook standard resolution.
    3. Keyboard - The so-called chiclet keys are very comfortable, and the placement of the shift key in the correct spot really separates this model from the rest.

    Cons:
    1. Windows XP - Yeah, I know. Most would say this is a pro. However, I passed the XP life-cycle on desktops and I'm now having to learn the intricacies of this OS. I wish I could have have them put the Windows 7 beta on it before shipping because I did not get it in time to download, but I digress.
    2. Performance - Not technically a con, but I expected a little more of a boost from the bus increase to 667 Mhz. Still, it serves its purposes as a netbook, and the upcoming performance boost in Intel's chipset will probably decrease battery life by 2-3 hours.

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