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.