Tuesday, January 29, 2008

eee by gum



I decided to spend some of my hard earned cash on a new toy, and being a sucker for all things miniaturised I am now the proud owner of an Asus eee pc. Stupid name...great toy.
It is a tiny wee subnotebook computer, under 900g in weight, with a 4g SD hard drive so no noisy fans and great battery life.

Obviously being me I did my research somewhat too quickly and assumed that the little devil's Linux OS could be persuaded to work with my 3G mobile broadband gadget. After hours on the eeeuser forums I was confuddled by xandros, ubuntu, kubuntu, and kernels ( swahili not my first language) so went in pursuit of a geek in Mudgee.

The guy at Dewdrop Computers admitted that he had a room full of eager geeks, but there was a hushed silence when I mentioned Linux. I distinctly got the impression that those versed in such practices had moved over to the dark side....he knew of some who dwelt underground in Sydney, but I felt that without the aid of Gandalf or a white wizard of similar might, my quest was doomed to failure.

However I was saved! The windows geeks have installed XP lite, and with a little twiddling and tweaking here I am online using the fabulous machine. Only $500, light, tiny, cute and working!
All I need to do is work out how to enable the sound, get the integral webcam working, install a second SD card and life will be complete.

Just need a few more days to resolve fatfingers on tiny keyboard issues, but this is a grey nomads dream....unless they have bad eyesight or arthritic fingers obviously.

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