ASUS Eee PC 20G

Little laptop, big features
By texruss (Abilene, Texas)

I bought the Linux version and after playing with it for a little while I booted from an external floppy drive with a Windows 98 boot disk, deltreed the Linux partitions, rebooted and fdisked and formatted the 4 GB C: drive and then used an external DVD drive to install XP Pro using an nLite custom slimmed down version. I also installed Office 2003. For $43 I bought a 2 GB RAM stick and replaced the 1 GB that came with it. I also bought a 16 GB SD card for $45 online to give additional storage.

Comments from observers: "Is that a toy computer?" No...it is full-featured and lots of power. I like the Asus 900 EEE weight factor as my primary laptop is a Dell Precision M6300 that is huge. My wishes for improvement: WiMax and Bluetooth so I'll probably get the new versions and this one may get passed on to a relative.
The lack of a CD drive is not critical here to me, but some may find it limiting. External DVD drives are cheap though. The onboard Atheros wireless chip is good in the room the router is in, but range is less or even impossible through walls that many larger laptop wifi chips would connect. I have a cheap external USB wifi thumb device that I use when the router range is beyond the internal chip. Three USB ports are nice...I have a USB mouse, but would prefer Bluetooth capability to save even that port use.
All in all I think most people will find it a great ultra portable as long as they realize battery life is less than three hours (which is about like most regular laptops). There are heavier third-party batteries that can deliver much longer usage and I would never buy the standard 4-cell battery at the prices I have seen. The newer models promise much greater battery life and bigger SSD capacity so Asus has a winner indeed. Get ultra portables down to VCR prices in five or less years and we'll have one in every classroom student's hands in America. That's a multi-billion dollar market even at $100 a unit.

Where to buy ASUS Eee PC 20G?

Buy ASUS Eee PC 20G at ElectronicMart

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