Before our holiday break I told suggested to Brad that he get me himself an Asus EeePC.  So what exactly is the Asus EeePC, well it's a tiny little sub-notebook computer that runs a version of Linux that's customized for it.  It has a 7" 800x480 screen (which is pretty low resolution), USB, WiFi, a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB of storage.  That's it, very tiny, very simple. We got it to play around with but my real goal was to see how good a "couch PC" it could be.

By couch PC I mean a small machine that you would grab to look up stuff (or check random emails) while you're sitting around on, well, your couch.  The first issue is the teeny-tiny keyboard.  You can type on it but it's really tough.  I find that I don't do full touch typing on it but instead sorta just aim my index and middle finger at it as I type.  For quick notes, etc this really does work just fine.

After using it for a day I realized that it's more cute than functional but why is this?  It's the OS that's on it, for me it's not usable outside of a web browser.  While I do a lot on the web I do a lot that isn't as well so I searched for a solution.  Guess what, this thing runs Windows XP and not only does it run XP it runs it damned nicely.  It shuts down and boots faster than my Macbook Pro does and feels very snappy when using it.  Not once so far have I thought "man this thing is slow", not once (try saying that about your Vista desktop!). I realized that a killer app for me at home is the Slingbox client which I use every day to watch TV around my apartment, I'm very happy to report that is runs the Slingbox client beautifully.

With only 4GB of storage it's been a trading game of what apps I just have to have vs. what I can live without.  I'm happy to report with all my critical apps (including Outlook but not Word/Powerpoint/Excel, just did the viewers for those) I've still got 1.5GB of free space.  I achieved this by deleting tons of crap from the default install of Windows.  In a future post I'll get into some details of how I got this all going.

Oh, did I mention this thing is only $349.99? And no Brad, you can't have it back.  Well I guess you can borrow it from me if you really want...