"Hello World!", said Eee PC.

So I decided to get an Asus Eee PC, and I must admit I am impressed. I really wanted to get a 9" model, but they are still not out yet and to be frank, it looks like the price is going to be a little on the high side as well.

Anyway, Sharon and I are heading to Switzerland on the weekend for a week of vacation and I wanted an utra-portable laptop (especially considering my main laptop fried two hard drives recently, and is freaking huge - about 6 lbs). This thing is incredible! It is only 7" but it packs a punch (that's what she said) in terms of functionality. The model I got came with Linux installed and to be honest I was going to wipe it and put XP on it. I bought a 1GB memory module and upgraded that before I even turned it on, and I also picked up an 8GB SD card for storage (I only got the 4G model, so the main SSD only has ~1.5GB free on it). I even bought an IDE/SATA to USB adapter to immediately put WinXP (or even Ubuntu) on it, but so far it has handled everything I have thrown at it without a hiccup, including:

• Connecting to my wireless network (duh)
• Transferring files to and from my Samba server
• Connecting my digital camera via USB and transferring pictures off of it (I did not expect this to work)
• Gmail
• Skype
• Connecting to Facebook and changing my profile picture (taken with the webcam on the Eee PC - even Facebook Chat works!)
• YouTube
• And now...Blogger

My only complaint so far is that the keyboard is really cheap. I don't mind the cramped size so much - but the key presses are very inconsistent and that gets to be annoying real fast. But I don't expect to be writing novels on this thing anyway.

I guess I shouldn't be so impressed. I mean these are standard OS and web services, and I know that Linux (and Firefox) can handle all of this, but it is just so much more impressive on such a small device. I think this thing is going to pay for itself really quickly in convenience alone and I am glad I didn't hold out for the 9" model. This is going to be sooo convenient on our trip! And since it can do all I need it to do for us while we are traveling I think I am going to leave Linux on it for the time being. Maybe I'll start hacking it later, but for now it does what I need it to do.

I love technology!