Syngensmyth Posted January 22, 2008 Posted January 22, 2008 Well here I am in mid air and my iPod is dead with 3 flight hours ahead. Sometimes my iPod seems not to stay shut off and the battery drains(what's up with that?). Asus EEE PC to the rescue. Not only is the EEE charging up my iPod but I am listening to music (and Spanish lessons) the whole way. I am really liking this little EEE. No way would I have dragged out my 17 inch beast on the airline. Even then the battery on my big laptop would have struggled to make 30 minutes I'm guessing. Wifi works great under XP (and on the native Linux OS). When did airports start charging for connection? I am not paying to get on public wifi, forget it. I am becoming more acclimated to the keyboard but still have to be careful and hit keys sharply and directly for them to register. My non-installing, portable program fetish is really paying off with the EEE. I don't have to install anything I use. I simply have the programs on a thumb drive and use these portable programs from where ever they reside. Right now I do have a few programs copied to the 4GB of flash memory that Mr. EEE uses for a hard drive so I am looking forward to my 16GB SDHC arrival. I wonder about the complaints of quick SDHC card death by some user reviews on NewEgg. I have not had this problem with the smaller SD cards in cameras. Maybe people are screwing up the format and don't know how to fix it. Time will tell. I have the pagefile turned off. Flash memory does have a limited life span of write/rewrite but the significance of this is probably overstated. Anyway, I try to keep the OS from writing to the flash HD as much as possible. All my systems have their daily use folders on another drive or partition anyway and this is the preferred EEE setup. Having pagefile turned off seems to cause no perceptible performance loss for my workings so far. The 2GB ram upgrade makes my EEE snappy and responsive. The EEE can be overclocked and the EEE community is very active. Someone has written a little OC program that works well. I was able to get my EEE to almost 800 mHz before screen pixilation. Some people claim to have OC'ed over 1000 mHz. Even though the EEE is a 900 mHz Celeron, it comes under clocked at 600 mHz. At 800 mHz I noticed more heat and I'm sure battery life suffers. I don't need the added speed now so I will stick with 600 mHz. To break 800 I would need a bios flash. I don't plan to game or recode video with my EEE so will probably not OC. I learned from the EEE community how to install XP from a single thumb drive. How cool is that? I could not seem to get an nLite modified install done correctly for the thumb drive install so just went back to installing the whole enchilada and stripped XP down post install as usual. With the limited storage of EEE it makes sense to cut the OS into a small practical footprint. The WoW factor of pulling out the little EEE is quite charming and you become the most popular person in any group for a few minutes. Explaining the innards makes their eye quickly glaze over so just stay with cute and you will be OK. I am heading to Peru in March and am looking forward to only taking my little EEE. It should provide the connectivity I need without all the hassle. I'll probably throw in my 80GB portable HD in case my picture taking overwhelms my thumb drives. Yikes - the Fed. just dropped the discount rate .75! That should spook the pants off everyone. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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