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Nutcrack Rapids
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- Hugh
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My "eee" pc from Asus came with a 7" display, 4Gb solid state hard drive and 521mb memory, it's name comes from Easy to work, Easy to learn, Easy to play. I paid £229.99 but atmo you can get them for £219.99 from many places including pcworld. The unit has 3 usb 2 ports, an sdhc slot and a vga output, along with audio in/out and has both Lan and wireless Lan built in. It's advertised as having a 900mhz Celeron processor which it does but it's underclocked to 630mhz to extend battery life, you can reclock it if you want but so far the machine runs like a dream at 630mhz for me.
Out of the box the laptop is ready to use (well from the mains at least while the battery is charging) booting silently thanks to the solid state drive into it's xandros operating system in under 30 seconds. I won't go into xandros here for two reasons, it's far better covered elsewhere and five minutes after I got it I wiped it and installed XP Home. Don't get me wrong Xandros is fine, it's a flavour of Linux and if it covers what you want it to do there's no reason not to keep it. I wanted to be able to do 'some' photo editing work and to use other windows based software so Linux was never on the cards for me.
XP Home installed from a usb dvdrom drive without a hitch and all the drivers you need are on the supplied Asus cd. When completed and with my choices of software installed I had 1.6gb free on the main drive which went up to about 2.3gb after I'd stopped xp from using virtual memory. I'd also deleted some of the bloatware crap that XP comes with like messenger etc.
A great resource for info is www.eeeuser.com which has a good wiki and forums for linux, xp, hardware, modding etc.
What I've done to it - Fitted a 4gb shdc card as a permanent second hard drive I've updated the video drivers so that I can get 800x600 resolution over and above the standard 800x480 the unit comes with, installed my favourite Opera browser, (Openoffice, e-reader software and my graphics software on the sdhc) I've ordered a 2gb so-dimm to replace the supplied 512mb and have a 40gb 2.5" hard drive in an icy box enclosure. Also a usb DVB-T stick and software to turn it into an excellent 7" digital tv set, I just need to add a wireless mouse (does anyone like those touchpad thigs?) and I reckon it's about complete.
A week or so back I made a tongue in cheek post about the ultimate photographers laptop (a 20" Dell that weighs half a ton) this wee machine is pretty close the the ideal out and about or travelling kit for me, it's much faster than I thought it would be and the laptop and 40gb usb drive together weigh just 1.2kilos (2lb 10oz), the laptop on it's own is 950 grams. Dimensions are 22.5cm long by 16cm deep, about the size of a large paperback book. Stated battery life is 3hrs 15 minutes which is confirmed by others but I've not been able to yet, the onboard wireless lan can be turned off to help here if it's not needed and already a l-ion battery pack has been found that extends this further. The keyboard is small but even my phat fingers have no real trouble typing on it with the exception of the small right shift key which I keep missing.
The 3e will use the usb drive quite happily to run programs from but I think it's greatest advantage will be the extra storage it offers, transfering from a flash card directly to the usb drive via the 3e is quick and easy and of course though mine is 40gb, the sky is the limit.
You can see from the box that other colours are available, white now with the girly pastel colours coming soon.
Out of the box the laptop is ready to use (well from the mains at least while the battery is charging) booting silently thanks to the solid state drive into it's xandros operating system in under 30 seconds. I won't go into xandros here for two reasons, it's far better covered elsewhere and five minutes after I got it I wiped it and installed XP Home. Don't get me wrong Xandros is fine, it's a flavour of Linux and if it covers what you want it to do there's no reason not to keep it. I wanted to be able to do 'some' photo editing work and to use other windows based software so Linux was never on the cards for me.
XP Home installed from a usb dvdrom drive without a hitch and all the drivers you need are on the supplied Asus cd. When completed and with my choices of software installed I had 1.6gb free on the main drive which went up to about 2.3gb after I'd stopped xp from using virtual memory. I'd also deleted some of the bloatware crap that XP comes with like messenger etc.
A great resource for info is www.eeeuser.com which has a good wiki and forums for linux, xp, hardware, modding etc.
What I've done to it - Fitted a 4gb shdc card as a permanent second hard drive I've updated the video drivers so that I can get 800x600 resolution over and above the standard 800x480 the unit comes with, installed my favourite Opera browser, (Openoffice, e-reader software and my graphics software on the sdhc) I've ordered a 2gb so-dimm to replace the supplied 512mb and have a 40gb 2.5" hard drive in an icy box enclosure. Also a usb DVB-T stick and software to turn it into an excellent 7" digital tv set, I just need to add a wireless mouse (does anyone like those touchpad thigs?) and I reckon it's about complete.
A week or so back I made a tongue in cheek post about the ultimate photographers laptop (a 20" Dell that weighs half a ton) this wee machine is pretty close the the ideal out and about or travelling kit for me, it's much faster than I thought it would be and the laptop and 40gb usb drive together weigh just 1.2kilos (2lb 10oz), the laptop on it's own is 950 grams. Dimensions are 22.5cm long by 16cm deep, about the size of a large paperback book. Stated battery life is 3hrs 15 minutes which is confirmed by others but I've not been able to yet, the onboard wireless lan can be turned off to help here if it's not needed and already a l-ion battery pack has been found that extends this further. The keyboard is small but even my phat fingers have no real trouble typing on it with the exception of the small right shift key which I keep missing.
The 3e will use the usb drive quite happily to run programs from but I think it's greatest advantage will be the extra storage it offers, transfering from a flash card directly to the usb drive via the 3e is quick and easy and of course though mine is 40gb, the sky is the limit.
You can see from the box that other colours are available, white now with the girly pastel colours coming soon.