[SWLUG] Gadgets at next Carmarthen meeting

[Dafydd Walters]

Hi Steve,

Steve Anderson wrote:
> I'm intrigued to know what you think of the Eee PC.

I love it! I bought it because I wanted a cheap PC I could do a bit of 
programming on, which I could throw into my small backpack and take with 
me anywhere.

To make it usable for my purposes, I've upgraded the RAM from 512MB to 
1GB (£18 for the SODIMM - I had to break the warranty seal to fit it), 
and added a 16GB SD card (£72).

The keyboard is small, but perfectly usable - feels similar to a Psion 
Series 5, if you ever used to use one of those.

I find the screen is very clear and crisp, and I don't have a problem 
with the low res display (800x480). I've not tried using the external 
VGA connector, so I don't know how well that works.

The three external USB 2.0 ports are handy for transferring stuff to and 
from the device when not on a wireless LAN.

I know some Eee users have blown away the bundled Xandros-based OS in 
favour of Ubuntu, and although I had originally planned to do that 
myself, I've decided to stick with the built-in Xandros for now, because 
everything "just works" out of the box so well (graphics, wireless 
network, etc.). It even came pre-loaded with codecs, nice fonts, Java 
and Flash all ready to go! I did, however, add an extra Xandros apt 
repository to my 'sources.list' so that I could add some additional 
software packages (build-essential, vim, etc.).

The one thing I don't like is the battery life. For such a diminutive 
computer with such a modest CPU (< 1GHz) and no moving parts, there's no 
excuse for the poor endurance (between 3 and 4 hours).

Dafydd.