EeePC First Impressions (second blog entry using it)
My wife gave me an EeePC for my birthday last week. I blogged about wanting one a few weeks ago and I guess she got the hint. Overall, she did pretty good with the request. She got me a linux based EeePC 901 with the SSD drive.
My first impression was that the damn thing was tiny, shiny and did I say tiny. I’ve been using it for a little over a week now and I am grabbing it from the computer room more often than sitting down at my desktop. I did take it to work with me as it fit in my bag with my other laptop and didn’t add much weight nor was it too bulky in addition to the MacBook Pro and a few folders and notebooks. I haven’t traveled with it, but I’m sure it will make the rounds soon.
After a week of use here are my first impressions both negative and positive:
Due to it’s size, the first thing I noticed was the size of the keyboard. The reviews out there that say it is too small are valid. It took me a few days of typing on it to adjust and I’m still not near as fast as I am on a full size keyboard. The most difficult thing is symbols, capital letters, and entering in complicated passwords because the right hand shift key is tiny (as opposed to a double sized key, it shares the normal space with the up arrow and the shift is on right). I can’t say that the keyboard is a show stopper as I’m typing this blog entry on the thing and I also typed up the entry last night. I’ve also typed a dozen e-mails and chatted with Skype and Pidgin (AIM).
The other main annoyance is the track pad is super sensitive to touching it while typing. So I’m often pecking away and the cursor is somewhere else in the text or on another window or button and I inadvertently hit the trackpad with my thumb and the focus moves or I start typing my text into somewhere else. I’m getting better at avoiding it, but I do end up hitting ctrl-z frequently to undo the last few letters I’ve typed somewhere else in this entry. I understand there is a utility that fixes this and disables the trackpad while typing and plan to look around for it, but I’ve installed Eeebuntu and I haven’t had too much luck finding a workable solution (I’ll post later on my experiences installing and using Eeebuntu and if I find a solution to this issue).
Given those main issues, I have to say that I really like the form factor. It works quite well sitting on my lap on the couch or even on my knees in bed (yeah yeah, I know….very sad (but true)). So despite the issues with it’s size, it’s what I wanted and is fitting the bill. I do have the alternative of my MacBook Pro as well as desktop machines if I need to do something that the size makes difficult.
The battery lasts for ever (some sites claim 8 hours but I think 7 is more likely). Just this morning, I surfed around on it over coffee and am sitting on the couch typing up this entry and I still have 5 hours and 50 minutes of battery (according to the power management app which has been pretty accurate to date). One of the reasons I looked at netbooks is that I saw someone using one in the airport recently. I had had my eye on the EeePCs for a while, but was still on the fence. I struck up a conversation with him and learned that on one or two night trips he didn’t even take his power supply, much less carry it in his briefcase (like I did with my current and previous laptops).
The SSD drive is nice as there is no vibration from the spinning. There is a fan, but it’s inactive most of the time and isn’t very noticeable even when running.
So those are my first impressions on the usability. I’ll post another entry later with my experiences upgrading the RAM to 2GB (why not spend $34.99), installing Eeebuntu, installing applications, file sharing with other machines and other issues dealing with hardware, compatiability, and the Eeebuntu useability.
