lol that thing is a novelty and nothing more

I'm genuinely curious how it would handle Vista basic.

Compare the Eee PC to, say, the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ31MN
http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/04/14/Sony-VAIO...
and it's easy to see why we rave about the little Asus box. We want cheap ultraportables, we don't want expensive DTR.
The bigger screen and the use of an Atom processor to get more battery life are the icing on the cake.

Good article. Firstly, thanks for spelling out exactly why the eee is so revolutionary. I've lost count of the number of times people post about spending the same on a quite respectably specced Dell. They and "the point" needed to be re-aquainted. Look at similar products often with the same CPU - $1200+ this time last year.

Anyway, I bought my eee 3 months ago and it is without doubt the single most useful piece of kit I've bought in years - it's used every single day, sometimes 24hrs a day for low-power P2P on an external 2.5" HDD and for internet radio - the small screen means front facing speakers and better sound than you'd dare hope for in something this size. It often sits on the floor while I take a bath. I did install windows which I did with XP lite. By removing language packs and other stuff I don't need, I have nearly 2GB space remaining with XP and office XP installed.

As for performance, I'd say it's generally quicker in XP than Linux, mainly because I know how to tweak my set-up properly. Disabling all the unneeded services etc. etc. Video certainly runs and looks better. You can download a utility to up the clock back to the rated 900MHz. It will "just" play 720p video with the main concept codec. standard resolution runs with full post-processing (deblocking/sharpening) just fine.

I'd recommend people put 2GB of RAM in and run a ramdisk for we cache, temp files, real player cache etc. etc. this both speeds it up and save SSD writes. Web browsing is not noticeably slower than on my core duo desktop. Firefox, Flashblock, and fullerscreen are your friends....

eee is revolutionary not only in the genuine portability but hopefully it will reduce the never-ending trend to bloat. People will re-assess what they actually do with a PC. The only thing it can't really do is game or encode video. As I don't game and only encode a couple DVDs a year, I actually realise how much a wasted on my powerful rigs. Asus has also effectively prolonged the existance of XP for another year or two.

I'll be buying the 8.9" when the atom-hearted mother comes out and my current one will be a bedside radio - or a car PC mod or a file server via USB disks or a low powered firewall or I may strap it to the back of my parents TV with an idiot-proof linux distro as a web browser and DVB-T decoder or any number of useful things.... As you can tell I LOVE MY EEE, I'm only sorry for those that still don't get it....

Props for using a Canadian Quarter.

Waiting for the 8.9" version as long as it doesn't bulk up too much more (and hopefully uses a more power efficient chipset and other components). I'm not too bothered about the Windows aspect, XP can be very frustrating if you don't use it often. Microsoft Works is a bit lame too. However a stripped XP with VLC, Firefox, tweaked user interface, etc, sounds good.

An odd thing is that my now-old 12" 1.33GHz iBook G4 came with a 4400MAh battery, and gets around 4 hours of battery life. This has a higher capacity battery, but has less life. Any ideas?

Just one thing I'd like to point out is that the white laptop against the all-white background makes it hard to distinguish the edges of the laptop on some screens.

Good review overall, albeit I do have a couple counterpoints:

The vast majority of consumers have little experience outside the Windows world. While some may enjoy learning the ins and outs of a new operating system, I suspect that most would rather get rolling in a familiar environment.

Disagree. Many consumers have experience with Palm, Blackberry, and other non-windows smartphone and PDA type devices, and seem to adapt to those just fine. The Linux EeePC's interface is a hair rougher than the average 3G phone or modern PDA, but comparable in layout and function. IMO Asus is offering this with Windows XP for a very simple reason: to sell even more of them by increasing the exposure. A WinXP sticker and extra display space in BestBuy is free marketing.

What makes this latest XP-powered Eee PC 4G special is the fact that it's selling for the exact same price as the Linux version, so you're essentially getting Windows for free.

Nope...unless this has the 3.5hr-rated battery, and I seem to recall that it only offers the 2.8hr-rated unit(?). That being the case only thing this offers that the now-$349 4G Surf doesn't have is a webcam/microphone combination, which are not exactly worth $50 manufacturing-cost-wise or in consumer value for many people. Thus, a large chunk of that $50 is basically covering the XP license, which is about right for a bulk OEM XP Home license. If that's valuable to someone, then obviously, go for it. But the price definitely isn't equivalent.

So the Eee PC is quite small, then. Small enough that you don't really need a laptop bag.

Fair enough. But if like me you happen to want one anyway, try the local department store's mobile electronics section -- I got a nice Targus bag that was designed for a 9" car DVD player kit, but happens to exactly fit my 4G Surf and a few accessories (AC adapter, mouse, miscellania) quite nicely for just $18.

Not quite on topic, but I saw some more pics of the 2133, and it looks very much like it's been OEMed by Asus for HP - the exhaust vents, VGA connector and other parts of the case design look like my Asus laptop.

I think I'm buying the upcoming model with the big screen the moment it arrives. These little notebooks are exciting, but I really want more than 800x480.

Nice. Putting an insecure version of Adobe Reader on the machine.

Link for the HP 2133 on page 2 is broken. It links to the same page as the review.

just wondering...does the EEE PC come with it's own external optical drive like the macbook air? or do you just buy an external burner and use it...if not i don't see how you could rip your "own collection" of movies

unless...you can setup the EEE PC to use your DVD drive on the desktop for instance as a network drive...possible?

Page 1 nitpick: 920 grams is more than 2 pounds.

I think I'm going to chillax until the Atom-based systems start seeing daylight.

What I would like to see is the OS offloaded to a dedicated (and really small) SSD.

BENCHMARKS! At least run a 3DMark on the thing.

nice review. i hope you guys will review the 8.9" version when it comes out.

how many programs did you guys try opening at once?

same with media playback... can it actually handle 800x480 xvid/divx decoding smoothly?

Still wainting for a larger screen, and more importantly, the cash to spare. Some time later this year the decision will be whether to get a better monitor for my desktop or get an Eee.

I'm inclined to get the Linux version.

I'd just love to see how well one of these would work running windows if the poor punter had also been sold a copy of Norton with it :lol:

The Eee PC is so close to being exactly what I want in a portable PC. It's cheap enough not to be precious, sturdy enough not to be fragile, and small enough to pack around.

I want to be able to literally toss my portable pc in a backpack or satchel and run with it.

Just give me the 8.9" version with a higher screen resolution (and perhaps a wee bit faster hardware and longer battery life) and I will be all over it. Hopefully rev. 2 or 3 will be there. The "free" XP license takes the cake.

Glad Microsoft caved decided to keep supporting XP for sub-notebooks. I'm hoping someone comes out with an AMD 780G subnotebook... it's a shame that AMD does not have a competitive low-power CPU, not to mention that a full-blown 780G takes too much power. I suppose nVidia+VIA (Isaiah) will eventually fit the bill but who knows when.

Well, 3 added pounds doesn't sound like a lot but when you're schlepping a backpack around the developing world it represents more than 10% of the total load. I've never bothered with a notepad on trips before, but I'm seriously tempted to get one of these.