Hmmm, perhaps this would make a good replacement laptop for my needs. The folks over at ArsTechnica.com fill us in on the just announced Eee laptops from Asus:
The Eee (rhymes with Wii) is an ultra-compact notebook with a 7-inch screen that weighs 2.03 pounds. It will be available in three different models, starting from $299 on up to $399, depending on storage capacity, memory, and presence of a built-in webcam. The low-end model, called “Surf,” has a 2GB Flash drive for storage and 256MB RAM. The high-end model, which is available now in Taiwan’s popular 3C computer stores, comes with a 8GB Flash drive and 1GB of DDR2 RAM. Both models feature a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor.
While the initial models will ship with Xandros Linux preinstalled, Microsoft has been anxious to get on the Eee bandwagon. According to Davis Tsai, general manager of Microsoft Taiwan, Asus is planning to launch an Eee PC running Windows XP before the end of this year. Windows Vista is out of the question as it would require too much storage space (a vanilla install of Vista runs at around 14GB) and has higher RAM and CPU requirements than its predecessor. At least Microsoft will still be selling XP to OEMs, having extended XP’s cut-off date to June 2008.
It’s not like I’d need much in the way of a machine for what I want to do with it, which is mainly browsing the web and writing blog posts, so the limited storage capacity isn’t a huge issue for me. If it runs at a reasonable speed, and the use of Flash RAM should help keep it speedy, then it’d probably be perfect. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of reviews it gets once it finally hits the streets. If nothing else I at least know the company that’s producing it well as I’ve built more than one PC that made use of an Asus motherboard in my time.
Any takes on the Xandros distro. of Linux? I pitched Ubuntu for OpenSUSE this weekend, so I don’t have any emotional investment in any particular distro. (Still in my “stupid noob” phase, y’see.)
One of the other forums I hang out in had someone with this to share:
“Out of frustration I made a stop by Best Buy not really expecting to find anything worthwhile and stumbled, upon all things, on a nice Gateway ML6720 laptop that hit all the marks I was after: nice 15.4” widescreen LCD, T2310 Intel Dual Core processor, 1GB ram, 120GB Seagate HD, four USB 2.0 ports, integrated media card reader, DVD+/-RW 8X DL drive, Vista Premium Home and a pricetag of $450. Demoing it for awhile I found the performance to be good and the laptop seemed surprisingly well constructed and not at all cheap-feeling for a budget laptop.”
He’s had it for a few days now and he’s pretty happy with it. The only adjustment he made was installing the OEM Vista so that it wiped all that extra crap it came with off. I didn’t know if that might be something you would be interested in but I thought I would pass it along.