The Asus Eee netbook
It's a funny old world. A few years ago manufacturers were hell bent on making laptops bigger and bigger. Seventeen-inch screens were de rigueur and there was even one with a 22-inch screen. But that's all changing.
They have finally twigged that for portable use some people want smaller, lighter machines. And so the netbook was born.
A netbook is a tiny portable PC, usually weighing less than 1kg and with a 7 to 9-inch screen. If you only want to do basic world processing and web browsing such a machine has a lot to offer, being small enough to fit in the corner of a briefcase or handbag, but powerful enough to handle two-three hour's work on a single charge.
Netbooks are available from Dell (Mini 9), Acer (Aspire One), MSI (Wind) and Asus (Eee PC) among others and this seemed like a good time to test drive one.
For the test I chose one of the cheapest on the market - the Asus Eee PC 701, running Windows XP with 512Mb of RAM and a sold-state 8Gb drive. At £135+VAT from Carphone Warehouse they don't come much cheaper.
Measuring just under nine inches (23cm) wide by six and half inches (17cm) deep and less than an inch (3cm) thick the PC701 may be small but it packs a punch, with built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, three USB sockets and even a VGA port for connecting to an external monitor. It has also a built-in webcam, bundled Skype, audio in and out and a slot for an SD memory card.
The seven-inch screen works at a resolution of 800x600 pixels and automatically pans as you move the cursor towards the edges. It is also quite sharp.
Some netbooks come with a version of the Linux operating system, which shouldn't put you off. Coupled with the bundled open source OpenOffice.org software and the Firefox web browser they are more than up to the job.
This model came with full-blown Windows XP and Microsoft Works - not quite as capable as Microsoft Office but able to open and save .doc or .docx format, as well as Excel's .xls. It comes with a PowerPoint viewer, but you can't actually create PowerPoint slides with it. With Windows XP and the associated software installed the computer's 8Gb of memory still had 5.21Gb left. Not big enough for your digital photograph collection, but more than adequate for documents and the odd additional program or two.
The biggest problem facing any computer only nine inches wide has got to be the keyboard. I have fingers like sausages, but managed to make a fair fist of using it and after a while became quite adept at keying text in without making too many errors. But I think it would drive you nuts if you had to use it as your main machine. Don't forget that you can always plug in an external keyboard and mouse (and screen) if need be.
Microsoft Works is OK, but if you intend sharing documents with other people try to avoid saving them as .wps (Works document) files. These are not very compatible, but it is the default format for Works and you have to physically force the machine to save as .doc each time.
The Eee PC 701 also includes Internet Explorer and this worked fine, although with most web sites you have to pan to see the right hand side as few are now only 800 pixels wide. E-mail is taken care of with either Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express - it does seem strange that both are bundled. It only took a couple of minutes to configure Live Mail with my Gmail IMAP account and all my mail and folders were there.
In case you hadn't gathered already, this feature was written on the Asus, and it did a pretty good job. Anyone familiar with a PC and MS Office will feel quite at home. If you are a Mac user who can't bear to even touch Windows then you can always go for the Linux version. In fact, one or two hackers have actually managed to get Mac OS X running on the Asus and Dell netbooks, although it isn't easy to do and is technically illegal.
At this point in the feature I thought I would try and get a little more adventurous. Could I add a better Office package, like OpenOffice.org or perhaps even use it with my 3G data dongle?
The answer to that second question was very easy as Carphone Warehouse actually bundles some of its netbooks with dongles. The dongle worked fine, although it did put an additional load on the battery, witnessed by increased cooling fan speed.
OpenOffice.org 3.1 is a free open-source office package that mirrors the applications in MS Office very well. I have used it (and its close cousin NeoOffice) on Macs and it is a good substitute.
After installation I still had more than 4Gb left and OpenOffice.org offers a user interface that is more like MS Word's. You can also set up .doc as your default format - much better.
At the two-hour mark the Asus still had 30% of its charge remaining and it was a further 45 minutes before I really had to think about reaching for the power cord.
For around £150 I think this netbook is a bargain. If you fancy a bigger screen and keyboard the Dell Mini 9 is also very nice at £242 + VAT. Just one questions remains - who wants one?
STOP PRESS - I have now bought an Acer Aspire One, which is currently running Windows XP and Mac OSX, but that's another story!
posted by Steve Nichols @ 3:34 PM
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