June 5, 2008

The ASUS Eee - Why buy an ASUS Eee for Your Home?

You get home from the office and while waiting for a meal, you want to check your personal e-mails and talk to some members of the family over the internet. You look at your desktop and there is your daughter with a heap of homework, keying like mad. You go to the portable and your son is researching for his homework. It has been like this for days. By the time you have had your meal, you are too tired to check the e-mails, even though the computers are available. Time to get another computer, but there is no space for another one. If you put it in your bedroom, then you will flop on the bed and fall asleep. If it goes in the lounge then someone else will use it. What do we do?

This scene may be fictional but the fight to gain access to the Internet and e-mails is a real one in many households. It is surprising that in the last 20 years the PC and the Internet have become so much part of what we do and how we do it. The changes to our society were even greater than the changes as a result of the installation of the first telephone systems.

The answer to this problem is the ASUS Eee. This sub-notebook computer is not designed to spend hours using it to do homework or research, but it is enough to check your e-mails and contact your relatives. Personally I would choose the Linux-based 900 Eee computer with 20GB hard drive. This gives some space to work on and does not encourage any of your children to load on their latest game. The 12GB Windows XP based version is also a good deal but it may be a little limited. The screen is small and so is the keyboard but it is not too heavy to rest on your knees in the lounge and use it there. The word processing, spreadsheet, web browsing, and communication software is all available and can be accessed there and then. It is a very quick little machine to start and so will help to perform minor tasks easily and quickly.

You may miss not having a CD or DVD drive for storage but if you really need one then buy an external one and use it as a backup drive for the other computers, especially of one or more of them do not have DVD writers. The backup from this little machine can be handled by memory cards and you may need to equip one of your other computers with a memory card reader in order to transfer the backups onto the other machines, but there are cheap and will connect into your USB socket.

All in all to cut down on the fights over the computers in the house the ASUS Eee seems an excellent solution. The Eee will not be stolen by any of the children for games or homework as the limitations of the hardware will make it unattractive, but this just makes it even more attractive to the parents. We do not need the fights, but we do need the access to the Internet. What did we do before we had the Internet?

So the next time you see this little box with the letters ASUS on the outside, don't just ignore it as a toy, or perhaps something for a child's birthday or Christmas, but take a look for your birthday and give yourself uninterrupted access to the Internet that you are paying for.

89 Asus Eee PC 901 Touch Screen Panel Kit MOD EeePC

US $69.99

Battery For Asus Eee PC 1005 1001 1005H 1005HA 1101HGO

US $42.95

89 Asus Eee PC 900 Touch Screen Panel Kit MOD EeePC

US $66.99

10 Laptop LCD Screen Panels for ASUS Eee PC 1001HA

US $77.87

10400mAh Laptop Notebook Battery 4 ASUS Eee PC 701 900

US $41.54

Asus 89 Eee PC 901 904HD Film to Film Touch Panel Kit

US $61.99

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June 3, 2008

ASUS Eee 700 or 900

Which Eee to Buy - ASUS Eee 700 or 900

I can guarantee which one you'll likely want, but the bottom line (price) may have the final say. You can save money by buying the Eee 700, but then you will not have all the add-on extras included on the 900. Look at them both and you'll see the difference is in the add-ons and features.

The outside of both the ASUS Eee 700 and 900 models is the same size. However the screen on the 700 is only a 7 inch compared to the 900 screen which is 8.9 inch. You should remember that the size of a computer screen is measured diagonally, and so there is an enormous difference in viewing area between the 700 and 900. As a result of the difference in viewing area, for the same program you are looking at there is less scrolling and screen positioning required to see just what you want.

The webcam is a 1.3 mega pixel standard on the 900. The 700 series has no webcam on the Surf models and a 0.3 mega pixel on the non-Surf.

The maximum size of solid state hard drive on the Asus Eee 700 series is 8GB, but that is increased to 12GB or 20GB on the newer Eee 900. On the 900 models, they both have 1GB of RAM. But the Eee 700's have 512MB of RAM, except the top-of-the-range 8G which has the 1GB of RAM. This may not sound an enormous amount of RAM if you are used to 2GB or 4GB of RAM in your current machine, but double the RAM will affect the speed that the computer responds.

We can argue that the webcam needs more RAM to be used effectively, but that is not the whole story.

ASUS has tried making a minimalist PC and have found that they cannot make it go fast enough without enlarging the hard disk. There is only one thing that really tests a computer and that is to put it into the hands of real users who have paid for the machine and let them use it. ASUS have said that they will be trying later to make use of the latest Atom processor from Intel, but until that is available the same processor is being used in both the 700 and 900 models. Try out the 700's and see if I am right that it does not have enough RAM or hard disc space.

The basic 700 model starts at $445.97 on Amazon's US web site (this is a 700 Surf 2G). It has no web cam and very little disc space at all. The top of the range 8G is priced at $599.99. These are for the Linux operating system. You can then change the operating system to Windows XP. The 900 models are the same price $549 and they have 20GB solid state drive on the Linux machine and a 12 GB on the Windows XP version. The difference in disc space covers ASUS for the cost of the licence that Microsoft charges for the Windows XP Operating system.

To my mind, to be able to use Windows XP effectively you will probably need to have more than 12GB of disc space. It would probably be better for the Windows XP machine to have the 20GB and increase the price, but you must make your mind up and buy what you are happiest with. The vast majority of people who read this article would probably say "I will go with the Windows that I know". I challenge you to go into a store and try out the Linux machine for half and hour and see what is better.