I shall return.
Friday, April 25, 2008
I fly out tomorrow morning at the crack of dawn to attend the scientific conference that has been eating up so much of my time lately.
I'll be back in Houston late next week, and look forward to the comparatively relaxed pace of my normal life -- and a return to regular blogging.
This is, incidentally, the first blog post to be composed on my brand spanking new ASUS Eee PC! Shortly after the demise of my desktop, I went to Micro Center to look at desktops and, while there, recalled that a commenter had mentioned that the chain carries them. I played around with the display model enough to see that even at half the size of a normal laptop, these are still big enough to be useful.
I was undecided about getting one of these then, but have since learned that I will be travelling enough during the next six months that having something of a convenient size would be worthwhile. This thing is the size of a paperback with larger-than-normal pages.
So far, I am very impressed, most of all with the screen, which is very sharp. (I'm writing this on the couch with it resting on my lap.) The keyboard does lead to more than my usual rate of typographical errors, but for a quick email or some web browsing, it's fine, and I'm packing a keyboard for this trip.
One last note.... It's white. I prefer black for my computers, but Micro Center was sold out of that color -- and most of the other choices are ghastly. (You can see what I mean by going here and scrolling down to the mice. They mostly make me want to say, "I am not a fourteen-year-old girl!") But I was leaving town, and had carried around the regular laptop enough lately to know for a fact that I didn't want to lug that thing around for most of every day for a week.
I was desperate yesterday, and the salesman had already confirmed that today''s shipment would not include any black machines. So I had him show me the only color I could imagine being palatable: white.
On opening the box, I noticed that it was a little silvery. Pleasantly surprised, I bought it and I'm just now getting to put it through its paces.
I won't rule out a post or two next week, but I'm not completely sure whether I'll have that much access to wireless, and I'll be short of time and privacy, so this will probably be it for about a week.....
-- CAV
Updates
5-2-08: Corrected "Microcenter" to Micro Center".
5-8-08: Corrected a hyperlink.
2 comments:
My roommate has an old P-II 266 which needs retiring, and I was suggesting the Asus to her.
When you get a chance, post the details about which model you chose, and which OS it's running (I expect Linux, based on what you said earlier about your "frankenputer"...)
Along those lines, I'm overhauling my hardware now to accomodate a new quad-core machine -- my first major hardware upgrade in 5 years. I usually try to upgrade only when the new setup is at least 4x faster than the old one.
The secondary goal is to divorce the Windows-based work installation from the Internet for security reasons (the quad-core will be local access only). All Internet-related tasks remain on the old machine, soon to be running Ubuntu "Hardy Heron".
That way, I present a harder target to any incoming malware -- and even if something still manages to take down this box, the work box is on a physically different network. It won't need to run any performance-sapping virus-checkers etc.
And I can run it all simultaneously, instead of switching back and forth via dual-boot.
Jim,
The details of the model I bought are here, in the leftmost column of the table.
I am extremely satisfied with this computer and will probably do a proper blog post about it again soon. My only gripe is that it seems hard to add new software, but considering what this computer is made for, that's really a minor problem for most people.
Gus
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