Click to viewWe’ve had the Asus Eee personal computer $ 399 4 GB model in my house since launch . And while you ca n’t fence with the system ’s unbeatable sizing / performance / toll ratio , user should bed that once the honeymoon euphoria of the cheap ultraportable wears off , they ’re live to look at with some pertinacious matter that very well may be plenty surf .
Screen
You cognize the 7 - inch screen size will be modest — but really , it ’s too lowly for extended purpose . Seeing my wife working on the laptop , I watch as the screen gradually moves closer and closer to her face , until she ’s essentially wearing the computer like television goggles . A 10 - inch screen poser sounds like the sweet patch , and more what you ’ve envision as idealistic .
Bugs
The system of rules is , quite only , not stable to play on . It freezes up frequently when just pop off through the arrangement ’s dashboard — even without multitasking in progress . And launching OpenOffice apps can be a hitting or miss process , too . Sure , the organisation is easy enough to boot ( and speedy in this regard as well ) , but the OS just never feels unchanging .
My guesswork is that bugs and functioning issues stem from a hardware trouble ( maybe that stick 512 MB is n’t enough after all ) and an graceless O ( Asus ’ custom Linux system could expend a few spell for sure ) . But , most sure , the 512 MB of RAM is n’t enough give the inefficiency of the OS ’s memory management . Asus , where are our updates ? We ’re still running software version 1.0 . This must be the least - patched OS in history .
Wi - Fi
The magnanimous annoyance , by far , has to be the organization ’s subpar Wi - Fi . If nothing else , the Eee is meant to be a web - surfboard machine , the perfect companion to your overpriced espresso boozing . But it has a ton of difficulty find hotspots . anticipate to retry detection several times before a inclination of local networks appears . That might not vocalize all that tedious , but lose five bit plus when connecting to the internet — frequently — gets real old tangible fast in the class 2008 .
And these problems even happen with your own saved networks . For some understanding the Eee does n’t like to recall surety keys . substance abuser eventually become sassy enough to glue the codification somewhere in their documents , but really , should we have to ?
ending
I ’m not sure that the Eee is a “ do n’t buy . ” But more and more every day , I ’m wishing that we ’d invested the $ 400 elsewhere ( a Modern smartphone , for representative ) . Initial followup accepted the system ’s shortcomings partially because everyone loved that gold price / performance / sizing ratio and part , even tacitly , because many await microbe to be ironed out in due course .
Maybe more RAM would improve the experience , but at this stage I ’m fear the investing . Maybe loading Ubuntu will solve the atomic number 76 problem — I plan on doing just that this weekend — but most user wo n’t deal with that hassle . At this point our love occasion is over and we realize that the Asus Eee PC , as important as it may be for the market , is a glorious “ fille ” in its current State Department .
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