A Man and his Penguin

A couple of days ago I saw that Myer was advertising the Asus EeePC, so today I went down to my old store and had a look.

Not bad, not bad. I didn’t get the opportunity to use the proper KDE environment side of it; I was just using the At-Ease-style interface for it. But OOo Writer launched in 7 seconds (pretty good), and it was responsive. The reports are correct: The keyboard is incredibly difficult to type on. It’s probably okay for hunt-and-peck’ers (the target market?), but a touch-typist like myself really struggled to hit the right keys.

I even had a little play on Planet Penguin Racer; the machine struggled there, the game was almost unplayable. I also noticed that Bubble Bobble and Crack Attack were installed. There is an included KDE program for looking at the webcam; the webcam’s quality is very good to my untrained eye, and actually better than the webcam I bought last week.

Weight-wise, the thing is quite light with a pretty good distribution of weight. I don’t imagine it will do backflips off your lap. The computer also didn’t seem to be putting out a lot of heat either.

The final thing I noticed was an "Anti-virus" program on the machine! I don’t know if it was using the ClamAV backend, or if it was possibly a placebo, but the About box says that it was developed by Xandros. I imagine it’s there more as a placebo - otherwise people would buy the computer, be worried that there’s no anti-virus on it, and then try to load Norton’s onto it (and/or ring up Asus and complain). Still, there’s nothing on there that suggests anti-spyware - maybe they’ll still get complaints?

All in all, I’d love to own one of these things. After the short time I spent with the machine I simply couldn’t get it out of my head, but unfortunately I can’t justify spending $500 on it. I don’t have a wireless router, I don’t travel, and my main computer is always free for me to use; and I’d rather wait until the post-Christmas sales and then learn to build a faster computer for myself.

Still, if you’re looking for a computer to give as a present, you can’t go wrong with the EeePC!

(EDIT: Is there an open-source alternative to Xandros’ EeePC program launcher interface? If not, why not?)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Other computers/OS'es. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.