EEExcitement.

Well I didn’t get any of the home improvement stuff I had hoped to accomplish this weekend done. I was simply not willing to tough it out in sub freezing temperatures in the garage. I am, after all, a delicate little flower.

I did manage to accomplish a respectable amount of reading for my classes and a whole lot of cooking. So I can’t say the weekend was wholly unproductive. I also got a chance to spend some quality time with my new toy… an EEE PC.

I got Dawn an EEE PC for Christmas to replace her old laptop. I became so envious of the gift that I eventually broke down and bought one for myself. Let me explain what an EEE is for the uninitiated. Basically an EEE is just a small laptop. There’s some debate on the correct verbal way to refer to the device. Some people say “E cubed”, some people just pronounce each letter “E E E”, but personally I prefer to simply squeal “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee” when I’m refereeing to it. Much to the delight of those around me, I assure you.

The EEE is a small form factor laptop. It comes with a lightweight Linux installation and is preconfigured for all the tasks you’re likely to use it for (web browsing, email, writing, etc). Let’s be clear about this up front. The EEE is not a workstation replacement and it’s not even a laptop replacement if you do serious work on your laptop. When I’m selecting a computer to do serious work on I place high value on screen real estate. The EEE simply doesn’t have much in the way of screen real estate (it has a small little 7” LCD screen). So the EEE is not designed to be the computer you reach for when you want to sit down and do serious work. It’s designed to be the computer that is so mobile that you’ll take it places you wouldn’t bother taking a serious computer. The EEE is smaller and lighter than a hardback book. It has a fast boot and suspends times. It basically is a device that allows people who need computers to have a small computer when they are in between their computers. How marvelous is that!

Now that I hammered home how the EEE isn’t a real work computer let me expound upon what it can do. It is a fully functional computer so you could do work on it if you wanted to. Most mobile devices sacrifice functionality for mobility, the EEE really only sacrifices on size. It has a full (small and cramped) keyboard so you can actually type on it. It takes a little getting used to, but actual normal typing is possible. It comes preinstalled with Open Office, which is a free competitor to Microsoft Office. Open Office comes with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint equivalents. They’ll even open and save documents in Microsoft Office format. It comes with FireFox as a web browser (the real full-fledged version, not some crippled mobile version of a web browser) and an honest-to-god version of Adobe Acrobat. So you’ll be able to do as much document reading, browsing, and/or writing as you want on the small screen.

The OS installed on the EEE is Linux Xandros with an easy to use GUI installed. If you get rid of the easy to use GUI (more on that tomorrow) then you have a full fledged Linux OS at your disposal. Basically anything you can do in Linux you can do on your EEE. I’ve managed to install all the software I need to create LaTeX PDF documents on my EEE! If Linux isn’t your thing then it also comes with Windows XP drivers so you can load a copy of Windows XP on it.

Oh the price? There are models that range between $300 and $500. The most popular models seem to be the $300 and $400 versions. For the record, I got a $300 model for myself (more and that tomorrow as well).