Asus Eee PC
It’s little, it’s cheap, it’s powered by Linux….and it’s on order! I took the plunge and decided to snag me one of these little buggers… The Asus Eee PC (8G in Galaxy Black). After hearing about them for months and itching to get a new laptop, I just pulled the trigger on ordering one from Dynamism. So I guess the big question is, why get one of these things? And secondarily, being a Windows system engineer, why get something that doesn’t run Windows?
Reason #1: Portability! That’s the single most important reason I think anyone is getting these for. They’re highly portable. I’m just tired of lugging around huge laptops. Sure, I convinced work to get me the 600-series Dell Latitude, but it’s still annoying to carry that thing around sometimes (probably wouldn’t be such a pain if they had given me a normal battery and not the extended one that creates a “wrist rest”, essentially making it as big as an 800-series). Besides, I don’t own that PC. The Eee isn’t a high-performance PC, most people aren’t buying this thing to play the latest games. They’re buying it because they want something easy to carry around, that gets the basics done, and is friendly to the pocketbook.
Reason #2: Price. If you compare this ultra-mobile PC with others in the same arena, this thing is priced really well. It doesn’t claim to be the top-of-the-line in any stats at all, but really for basic everyday use, most people don’t need all that power anyways. I always get a kick out of people shopping at Best Buy for the latest quad-core PC, who only intend on using it for email, web browsing, and the occasional spreadsheet.
Why not run Windows on it? Well, you could. In fact, Asus intends on releasing them with Windows at some point (XP only, you’d have to be completely nuts to think that you could actually get Vista to run well on this device). And they do include a CD-ROM disc that has drivers for running Windows in case you want to wipe it and install XP on your own. For what I intend on using it for, Windows won’t provide me any benefit though. Basic web browsing, email, chat, Skype, office documents…it can do all that stuff with the factory install of Xandros. Who knows, maybe down the road at some point I might throw a copy of XP on it, or dual-boot with a SD card that has XP on it.
I can’t wait for my Eee to come in. Granted my work laptop is WAY more powerful than the Eee, I don’t own the Latitude. It’s a work PC. The Eee will be my personal use portable PC that I can bring with me wherever, instead of lugging around my larger work laptop. Hopefully it’ll run cooler than the Latitude. It doesn’t have a mechanical hard drive in it, and isn’t dual-core, so it should be a lot cooler. I hate that about normal laptops these days. They run too hot.
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3/5ths of the team at work now appear to have public blog sites of information, rants, technology, and any other crap that we find to litter the Interpipes with. Yay! Now all we have to do is figure out how we can get Levvy and Oh Maury (names changed of course to protect their identities) to get with the times and become one with the world of Web 2.0. Check my blogroll for The Raven Report and PhishThis!
vs. 
Yeah, I’m using both right now to manage a few different sites that I have…and I keep wondering which one is better for me to use for each. I guess it all depends on what you want to do. There’s a lot of overlap. Both can use plugins and you can place content into “areas” of the site. Wordpress uses widgets, but you have to have a template that’s aware of widgets. Joomla uses site modules that can be placed into positions pre-defined in the template you’re using.
