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Micro computing

My bank recently sent my wife and I a brrand new Asus EEE PC after swittching service plans or somthing. We're not really sure why to tell you the truth, but we're keeping it.

My bank recently sent my wife and I a brrand new Asus EEE PC after swittching service plans or somthing. We're not really sure why to tell you the truth, but we're keeping it. Please pardon the spelling mistakes, the key oard on the EEE PC is just eigght and a half inches wide, compared to a normal 11.5 inches and the keys are almost two small to type properly. I'm slowly getting used to it but it's not easy.

The entire system has just 512 MB of storage, about 80 per cent of which is being usd for te Linux Xandros operating system and all the software it came bundled with. I'm in the process of freeing up more space by deletng a few children's games and educational programs, but the Add/Remove Software tool is next to useless. Like the copyof Ubuntu I;m running on a laptop at home, I hav to use the Terminal window to do most things, which means I have to look up the "sudo apt-get" command lines to manually remove those programs. For a computer geek with no programming knowledge outside HTML and basic Java, I actually prefer it that way.

Overall, I'm quite impressed. The onboard memory is low, but you can put in an SD memory card to add up to 16 GB of storage. Tiger Direct ( www.tigerdirect.ca ) sells 8 GB for about $50 these days so storage is not really an issue for me. Besides, these days you can do almost everything you need to do online — save your photos on Flickr ( www.flickr.com ), your documents and spreadsheets at Google Docs ( www.gmail.com ), and all you other random files at ADrive ( www.adrive.com ) or XDrive (www.xdrive.com) free of charge. As for music, you can store your own tunes at MP3Tunes Locker ( www.mp3tunes.com ), or just build custom playlists at Last FM ( www.lastfm.com ) or Project Playlist  ( www.projectplaylist.com ), etc.

(Good thing this computer has an Undo feature — I just erased the last two paragraphs somehow, probably by accidentally dragging my thumb over the EEE PC’s small and sensitive touchpad.)

The EEE PC processor is powered by a very small but very capable Intel Centrino chip, has bout 256 MB of RAM memory, and 802.11g wi-fi capability. The seven-inch screen runs at a respectable 800x480 resolution (that you can apparently increase through various hacks, but I have trouble reading small print on the screen as is).

The system comes with a variety of software, including Firefox 2.0, Skype, Linux e-mail and messenger clients, a handful of simple games, Open Office ( www.openoffice.org ) for word processing and spreadsheets, and a variety of picture viewers, music players and video players capable of reading most popular formats. There’s no CD-ROM or DVD player, so it’s kind of limited as a portable media player unless you download movies on another computer, resize them to fit the screen, and transfer them over using an SD card.

There are onboard speakers, which sound about as small as they look, and a built-in microphone that you can use with Skype.

Needless to say, the EEE PC is not for serious computing and is extremely limited for many applications. However, if you're looking for something to surf the web, send e-mails, read e-books on the bus, or to mess around with while you're sitting on the couch, then it's perfect. It only costs a few hundred bucks for the most basic model and it's good value for the money. I wouldn’t suggest it for students, writers, or anybody who needs to be accurate with their typing, but overall it’s not a bad gadget.

Basically Asus invented the Ultra Movile PC (UMPC) market, and has been cleaning up with industry awards over the past year. Asus (www.asus.com) has also cleaned up in sales, as EEE PCs were the best selling computers last fall and winter. That in turn has prompted other companies to rush to market with their own nano laptops, like the Dreambook Light (www.pioneercomputers.com), the Everex Cloudbook (www.everex.com), the HP Mini-Note (www.hp.com), the ECS G10IL (www.ecs.com), the MSI Wind (www.liliputing.com), to name just a few. Rumour has it that Dell, Apple, IBM, Acer, Samsung, Sony and Gigabyte will be launching their own “EEE PC” killers in the next year.

What I really like about the idea is that it strips computing down to its basic foundations, throwing out all the bells and whistles that most of us rarely, if ever, use. It’s nice to have a portable computer that’s small, lightweight, and won’t cost you a fortune when you drop it on the floor.

There are a few drawbacks. Battery life, which is between three and five hours, seems a little low, although Asus is coming out with a six cell battery that should extend life to six hours or more. The screen is small, but it’s easy to get rid of the bottom bar and shrink the top bar in applications to create more space. It also heats up a lot, which is usually a sign of inefficiency — heat is a waste byproduct of computing, and more efficient processors, hard drives and other components produce less heat.

Would I buy an EEE PC if one didn’t come free from my bank? Probably not, as I already have a desktop and laptop at home, and already spend most of my day on the computer — I need less computer time, not more. But if you need to compute on the go, and portability is a factor, you could do a lot worse.