A video of my eeePC in action.

I found this website, pretty new, who is giving away 3 laptops, a 12.1″ super powerful and mobile laptop, a gaming laptop, and the HPX.

I entered, of course, and I encourage for you guys to check it out as well.

http://thetechdon.com/win-a-3000-laptop/ 

Hello everyone.

As you may have noticed, I got my eeePC a couple of weeks ago, and now having spent some time with it I decided to write a little review/overview thing where I praise it about its abilities and rant about its shortcomings.

The eeePC comes preloaded, surprisingly, with Linux. Linux has earned itself a reputation of being not user friendly. However, this is not the case with this Linux, a custom Xandros(which is based on Debian).

Now, the eeePC comes preloaded with basically everything you need. It comes with Firefox, Pidgin, the newest Skype, OpenOffice, Mplayer(for videos), and Amarok, which is an iTunes-like and iPod compatible media manager. These applications are given generic names based on what they do(Firefox is web, Amarok is music manager, etc). The only thing you’ll notice is that a decent photo editing software is missing.

Now, the eeePC is user friendly as long as you dont need to add anything else to it, like the average user looking for a cheap UMPC. However I am not one of these people and I always have the urge to exploit all my electronics to get the most out of them. Thankfully, since Xandros is based on Debian, you can add Debian repositories, and use synaptic. While launching external programs calls for opening the terminal, crafty users have managed to release applications to change the OS tabs.

And of course, we can’t forget about games. Basically, all of the games I tried, did not work under Wine. Eventually I just decided to keep it to native Linux applications, so I installed the obligatory Quake 3 Arena, and a bunch of other 3D games(which work very well actually). Oh and Tux Racer came preinstalled, yay! Another thing I must mention is that, emulation is not very good. N64 runs at 11fps during gameplay, not playable at all. SNES is playable but has sound issues for the most part. GBA doesn’t work well natively, unless you use no$gba under wine, which works very well surprisingly. Thankfully, web based games work the best, including java-based games like RuneScape(make sure to install Fuller Screen for Firefox).

I was, however, impressed on how well it plays media. YouTube works fine, unsurprisingly, and after a quick script I that I got from eeeuser.com, this little machine was playing everything I was throwing at it without lag or sync issues.

Lastly, there are a few cons about this system. Even though the laptop is advertised as lasting 3.5 hours, I often get an hour under, which is somewhat disappointing, but after buying a 10$ car charger from eBay I thought no more of it. Also, the border around the screen detracts from it aesthetically. And the last con is that, while silent, it gets warm after 20 minutes of use. Overall its a great machine, and I do recommend getting either the 2G, 4G surf, or 4G model. I personally found that space was never an issue, and I still have 3GB out of 4GB left on my SD card.

Oh, and this review was completely written under the eee.

To show that I’m still alive and that this site is going to be updated more frequently, I added a new, easier-on-the-eyes, theme. It is a lot more simple.

In other news, I got a brand new eeePC. It is the 701 black version, with webcam. Unfortunately I am having trouble getting games to run off of SD cards… but at least RuneScape works! Haha. So I have been busy with that. Heres a picture taken by me that I edited in photoshop.

http://shtbc.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/eee1.jpg - full size