The eeePC Comes of Age

I am sad. And weak. And I go through phases where I buy new computers. I also sell slightly older ones on ebay, and so it kind of balances out. Today I bought another computer.

Last week I sold my Asus EEEPC 701 because although it was lovely and implausibly cheap I never really used it much. And besides I needed the money to pay for yet another computer that I seemed to have bought, of which more later when I actually get my hands on it.

Anyhoo, having sold lots of things on ebay for more than I expected I found that I could afford to buy the computer that I've got today (I hope you are all keeping up).

The 701 sold me on the idea of a mini-laptop, it was just that I wanted one that was genuinely useful. And to me that means running Windows. I quite like Linux, but it turns out that most of what I want to do has a Microsoft flavour. We managed to get the 701 to run XP quite successfully, but the small screen size made using it a bit of a pain, and the lack of a proper keyboard was also somewhat irritating. And to put all the software I wanted on the device would have filled the solid state memory several times over. So off it went.

What I actually wanted was a mini-laptop with a proper keyboard, a slightly larger screen, a hard disk and running Windows XP. And it turns out that you can get exactly that in PC World, for only sixty pounds more than the original device.

The Advent 4211 is a re-badged MSI Wind. This is one of the newer mini-laptops with one of the latest Intel Atom processors. It comes with 1G of memory, a 90G hard disk, a lovely 10" display delivering a very useable 1024x600 resolution and it works a treat with Windows XP. It is nowhere near as funky looking as some of the mini-laptops, being a rather somber black, but it goes like a rocket. And it only costs 280 quid, which to me is a major bargain.

This afternoon I put Visual Studio Express and XNA Game Studio on it and was soon running some of my XNA demos with no problems at all. It won't have the grunt to do the 3D stuff, but for simple programs it is well up to the job. Windows XP on the Atom seems to zoom along very satisfactorily. The keyboard is nice to use with good sized keys and the screen looks great. It also plays movie files extremely competently, the only let down is the rather poor quality of the internal speakers (but you can of course add headphones or an external amplifier).

It actually comes with a copy of Microsoft Works on the hard disk which means that you can be writing documents and spreadsheeting to your hearts content straight out of the box. I've not had a chance to test out the battery life yet, but from the reviews I reckon that a couple of hours should be tenable. And there is also a high capacity battery available.

If you are in the market for a dirt cheap, and very portable, laptop then I don't think you should look any further.

Comments

[Burkey]

I've taken the plunge for a mini-laptop as well, and have decided to go for the Acer Aspire One (£249) - http://tinyurl.com/67uchz - The screen is only 8.9" so it isn't quite as big but it does have 1gb of RAM and a 120gb hard drive. The initial reviews seemed good so I'm hoping that it proves to be as good as they say!

[Rob]

Oooh. Very cute. It was seeing the Aspire One in Currys Digital on Saturday that got me back on the mini-notebook trail. The One is a very nice looking device and the quality of manufacture is really high. In fact I very nearly got one, it was only the fact that the Advent has a slightly larger screen and I get XP fitted that made me go for it.

Remember that if you are a student at a UK Educational Institution which is in Microsoft Adademic Alliance you can get free copies of Microsoft Operating Systems, including XP, if you ever fancy a change from Linux.

[Burkey]

Indeed, I have it already :-)

Question though: Will it require any special stripped down version of XP, or will I be fine to put the standard SP2 copy on as-is and then put the drivers on?

[Rob]

I reckon that it should just work. There is nothing special about the XP on my Advent. You only need a specially stripped down version if you are running on a machine with no hard disk. In this situation you should turn off the swap file and you can leave out some windows components to save disk space. It should just work.

If you are lucky you might get an XP driver disk in with the machine. That is what Asus did with the 701.

[Burkey]

Cool, thanks for the advice! Hoping they are released this week as specified.. They were initially listed as end of July then pushed back ¬_¬

[Paolo Barone]

Rob,
I just ordered an ASUS eeePC 901... will let you know how that goes :)

[Chris R]

I bought an Advent 4211 over the weekend.

I upgraded the memory to 2GB and as soon as my new SD cards arrives I'll be dual booting OS X and Vista on it.

Best £280 I've spent.

[james]

Are you still using your tiny laptop for development? If so, what's it really like running Visual Studio on it?

I use it on my 13" Macbook under virtualisation and it's quite usable, but I'm not sure I could cope with a smaller screen.

[keeron]

i like the acer aspire 1. i am gonna get five of these babys and scale down my recording studio, from 5 quite old desktops and 2 crt monitors and loads of hardware which causes me to live seperate from my girl and kids because of the size of the studio to similar power but miniturised to fit in the cupboard under the stairs. so bigup for the netbook as i can downsize my old studio for one i can sling in a backpack for less than 2 grand. i can still keep my keyboards and sound modules all on shelves in a tiny cupboard thanks to these netbooks hurray i can sell my hardware and go minimalist without compromising the powerfulness of my soon to be scraped hardware/software setup

[keeron]

oh yeah and more importantly i can move in with my family after years of worrying if my studios been nicked when i stay at their house