Eee!!! It’s your next PC!
December 16th, 2007 by 
Rory Harper
I figure this is another of my posts on a subject that you all already know about. But, just in case you’re not as deep into computer-porn as are Rachael, me, and, most especially Unca Stevie, here’s the very hottest geek toy I’ve seen in the past ten years.
It’s the EeePC sub-sub-sub notebook computer, and it retails for $399. If you can find one.
She Who Is Awesome first pointed it out to me, because she’s been obsessing about finding a portable computer that will meet her cool, on-the-go-at-all-times-lifestyle need to be fully connected to the Interwebs and her loved ones, no matter where or when she might be. She got herself a Fujitsu LifeBook touch-screen tablet PC last year, but it just wasn’t cutting it in the speed and functionality department.
The EeePC is a joint venture between Intel and Asus. The damn things are vanishing off the shelves and from Net stores so quickly that I panicked and grabbed one for her from Costco at an above-retail price last week in fear that literally none would be available by now. There were NONE to be found in Austin.
It’s two pounds of svelte black perfection. It’s smaller and lighter than most trade paperback books. Has a 7″ screen with a resolution of 800 x 480. A customized distro of Xandros Linux pre-loaded and running gracefully on a 900 MHz Centrino CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 4 Gigs of Flash memory for storage instead of a hard drive, built-in high-speed WiFi, built in webcam with sound, preloaded with Skype. Boots in under 30 seconds. Has USB2 ports for additional storage or to plug in another keyboard or mouse. The included keyboard feels extremely good, though. Can drive a full sized monitor to 1600 x 1200 pixel resolution.
It feels quick and alive to use. It’s solidly built. There seem to be no compromises made in its execution that might leave its intended audience unsatisfied in any way.
And it’s fucking gorgeous. It makes Apple’s arty-farty design aesthetic look pretentious by comparison. It is perfectly the thing that it was meant to be.
Rach got hers this weekend as her big Yule present. It think it was love at first sight, but it also bodes to be a harmonious long-term relationship. It just flat ran out of the box into her hands. It picked up and attached to signals and surfed the Web at multiple in-crowd bistros, and at the Godddam Hippie Commune, and she and I and Unca Stevie have successfully committed video Skype using theirs.
Yes, the reason that I was having trouble finding any EeePCs last week is that Unca Stevie has bought almost all of them. I think he’s trying to corner the market.
She has no trouble with typing fast on it. The small screen doesn’t feel crowded or insufficient, as I’d feared it would. It’s bright and clear and detailed.
The software and hardware hackers have already descended on this thing like a pack of hungry werewolves. Windows loads on it, and people are already modifying the hardware that it comes with, as details about chipsets and other components are relentlessly ferreted out by people who were born holding a soldering iron in one hand and an oscilloscope in the other.
One of the most feverish forums I’ve ever seen is to be found at www.eeeuser.com, which Unca Stevie turned me on to. I highly encourage you to go there now and catch the fever. You might even be able to acquire one before Yule, if you’re willing to do a little kicking and biting to get to it.
Unca Rory says: Check It Out!
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Posted in Rachael is Awesome, Rory, Steve, Technology, Toys | 
10 Comments »
December 16th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
For $399 right now, I can get the OLPC and send one as well.
I’m with Charlie Stross on this one; probably a great machine, but street value will soon be around seven quid. (I think he said something like 5 and 3, but let’s round up.)
December 17th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Ooh, thanks for the ref to Stross, Ken! I’ve hit the blog entry and there’s a fascinating discussion going on in comments. I haven’t had a chance to get past about the first 50 comments but it’s extremely educational (for me).
We considered the OLPC, but it’s simply not as capable a machine, and isn’t trying to be. Both of them are trying to achieve a different mix of features and functionality, and I think the EeePC comes closer to what Rach wanted and needed.
I think the thing that I’d like to point out about Stross’s entry is that he and a lot of his commenters are speculating about future trends. We may indeed see the ultra-cheap commoditized machine relatively soon, and the EEEpc and OLPC may be harbingers of the new dawn in that.
Next year is always going to be a better time to buy a computer, but you gotta jump in the moving river at some time and go fishing for the fish that are currently there.
Right now, the EeePC does the core things that we wanted, and does them well, at a much better price than was available before November.
In other words,there may be an uber-EeePC-thing right around the corner. But I can’t buy it this month. I suspect it’ll take a year or so for this new niche paradigm to ripple through the market.
I suspect that we’ll soon see more and more machines with similar functionality at a similar price point. But the nearly-free PC fully loaded with all wanted software isn’t anytime soon.
… Uh, unless something really, unexpectedly convulsive happens, of course. Which it has in this modern world so often. (Equivocating here, and in other places in this comment, so I don’t look like a total moron in hind-sight if the revolution does happen next year….)
I gotta admit, though, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on the more complex aspects of this subject, so this is just my current take on the situation.
I’m willing to be convinced otherwise, but believe that it’s mostly just wait-and-see about what reality actually emerges from the probability cloud.
In the meantime, my daughter has a Yule present that pleases her greatly.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
*Loves her ee pc* I am writing on it now! It’s so nifty.
December 17th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
As Rory hinted, the mixon-gould clan has three of these devices. Two in black and one in pearly white. While Rory correctly identifies the processor as a 900 MHz Centrino, it is actually run at 630 MHz because the front side bus is run at 70 MHz instead of 100 MHz. People have run alternative kernels that do allow overclocking. Some have reported no trouble doing this and others have reported stability issues.
It runs damn fast as it is out of the box so I don’t particularly want to risk it.
However, it does make me want to redesign Eat Our Brains to a 2 column fixed width design.
December 18th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Correction to my previous post: there are a couple of different ways to overclock the eee pc. I haven’t seen anybody who overclocked with the alternative kernel complaining about instability. There is an alternative bios that can be flashed into it and some of the people who have gone this route report instability.
What I absolutely love about this machine, unlike, say, windows, is that hight talented people are making hardware and software mods and making the how-to’s freely available.
I’m running a full KDE desktop instead of the simplified GUI and I’ve added gimp and will probably end up with a 4 gig sd card to expand storage (costco is selling those at $40 a pop with a usb reader for your other machines.)
The one thing I’d like is an extended battery. There’s talk of a ten cell battery (that will bulk up things a bit) available next year. This will probably take it up to ten hours of heavy use.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Yeah, clocking up to 900 GHz is definitely on my list. One of the things I’m going to be interested in is to see if it’s going to be possible to load XP, say an NLite installation, onto it, and then dual-boot. Would need to load at least a GB of RAM plus the extra SD memory for storage.
Reaper, which is my recording program, will run very gracefully off of a USB key, and I also have a Line6 TonePort UX-1, which connects via USB. It has a 1/4″ input jack for guitar, and an XLR input for microphone, as well as some cool built-in guitar amp and microphone preamp simulation software that runs in XP.
The Eee may have the potential to end up being a pretty good ultra-portable field recording computer. Say, for band jams…
There are also some universal docking stations out there that connect via USB. If this machine talks to them properly, Rach could bring hers home, plug in one cable, and use her external keyboard, mouse, monitor, and network wire.
And this is all just the beginning with this little jewel.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:22 am
re: the two column design. Have you tried reading Eat Our Brains in Akregator? It looks quite nice on a small screen.
December 19th, 2007 at 3:20 am
How does Karegator handle comments? And posting same?
December 19th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Comments:
If you put the main feed and the comments feed in an “Eat Our Brains” folder then you can read them separately or interleaved (by timestamp). Akregator won’t match up comments to the original posts (e.g., like a usenet style comment thread) but the titles in your comment thread give the original post and commentor, so this is pretty easy to keep track of.
Posting same:
You can right click an article to bring up the corresponding webpage in either an external browser (e.g. firefox/konqueror) or in a khtml tab within akregator (that’s what I’m using for this comment). For a small screen width, you have to scroll right a bit to deal with EoB’s fixed width css, but it’s not much of a pain.
There isn’t a feature for posting comments when reading feeds offline.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
[...] something of a revelation. She’s always near the cutting edge with her technology, as witness her independent discovery of the EeePC, so I thought I should mention it as a public service. She’s pretty ecstatic about its potential, [...]