EeePC 900

I don't have a huge amount of luck with laptops. I spend easily 6 hours a day (sometime much more) using mine and I guess I expect quite a lot from it - high performance, long battery life light weight small footprint. You know. The things you pay an absolute fortune for. Only I refuse to pay and absolute fortune for a laptop. I guess £800 is about my maximum. Let's face it, if I go and buy a £2000 laptop and around about half-way through my third day of ownership, I'll drop it.

So that's why I chose my HP Pavillion DV2000. 14.1 inch, 3 hours battery, powerful enough, looked nice. Two years happy computing later and the hard drive finally dies, which was only to be expected really as I commute for between 3 and 4 hours every day, which means may laptop gets thoroughly shaken about.

New hard drive, take the plunge with Linux (Ubunbtu then OpenSuSE) and all is good. Then last Thursday I turn my trusty laptop on to the sound of random crackles from the speakers and nothing else, no bios messages, nothing. OK. Time to do two things: replace my laptop with something temporary, repair my old laptop.

A number of people I know have bought (and are universally happy with) eeePC 701s. Given my recent switch away from MS Windows and onto Linux the idea of a small Linux based laptop is very attractive. The screen was a bit of a sticking point though. A little small. But not on the 900 series. The other fact that sold me on this was the solid state disk - 20GB, no moving parts (so less prone to breaking).

One shopping trip later, and for the quite reasonable price of £329 I'm the owner of an EeePC 900, Linux, 20GB.

The initial OS runs in tabbed 'wizard' mode. I have to say this was a little uncomfortable as it makes the eeePC as easy to use and accessible as mobile phone, but makes it hard to get beyond the default set of applications. A quick search of web gives a number of pages that provide access to relatively (assuming you know a little about Linux) easy methods for switching to a standard KDE window manager referred to as 'advanced desktop'.

One thing that I did try was installing an alternative Linux distribution. Installing OpenSuSE 10.3 went rather easily, and worked exactly as you would expect it to. Drivers were easily available for just about everything, and the experience and Gnome (my preference over KDE) worked fine.
One reason has made me reinstall the default OS and use the KDE advanced desktop: speed.

A boot under OpenSuSE was taking nearly 2 minutes. I've just timed a boot and it's taking only 28 seconds to get to the point where the OS has finished loading and is offering me a dialogue asking me how I want to open the 4GB SD card I have in at the moment. That kind of speed difference seems to be consistent across all the applications starting up. I don't know anywhere near enough about Linux to be able to say why that might be, but it is enough to make the eeePC easy to use for the 1 thing I want to look up quickly, rather than waiting an age for it to boot. If I wanted to wait, I'd go back to MS Windows!

My one issue exists because I installed OpenSuSE. The 20GB solid state disk appears to be made up of a 4GB onboard unit supported by a 16GB secondary disk. I have no issue about the fact that the two are separate. My problem is that the recovery disk provided with the eeePC doesn't reconfigure this disk for you. As it stands, I have only the 4GB internal drive configured. The solution to this problem is trickier than I expected - I have created a partition, used fstab to say what it is and can now use mount /dev/sdb1 to mount it. But these doesn't seem to be any way to get it to automount. Even setting two linux gurus that I know onto the problem hasn't yielded a solution. I'll post one when / if I find one.

The eeePC offers a good enough screen and enough performance that I can do the image, layout and web based work I always have done. The screen is a little small but at 1024x600 pixels is just large enough to be usable. Gimp and Scribus work fine (if a little cramped). Even the Second Life client runs fast enough to be usable when all the settings are turned down. Thunderbird and Skype are already installed and Flock works well and is easy to install.

Oh, and battery life is over 2 and a half hours. Long enough, and longer using less taxing applications.

My next task is to find out if my HP can be repaired and how much / how long that will take. In the mean-time, I'm happy and productive with my eeePC.

Alan