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By Johnny, January 30, 2008 12:13 am

The morning when Apple announced that they were going to release the MacBook Air, I came across a couple of comments on Gizmodo‘s site where people were saying that you can buy 5 EEEPC. What the hell was a EEEPC? After a brief search, I found 2 sites that was interesting. First, the official Asus EEEPC site which was the sales site for this little machine. The second site was the EEEUser site. This was the unofficial fan site. After reading about it, I found myself compelled to purchase one. I checked Amazon and saw that they sold this wonderful machine. I quickly ordered one with a 8GB SDHC memory card for extra storage.

I received it this past weekend and have been carrying this little machine around. It runs a Xandros Linux operating system. The systems is very straight-forward and easy to use. It’s perfect for on the go computing. I just need something to jump onto the Internet or small tasks like taking notes wherever I go. It’s tiny and unobtrusive. Boots up really fast from a cold shutdown. One complaint I have is that it gets hot which then kicks off the somewhat noisy fan. Battery life could be better since this thing doesn’t use your standard hard drive. It uses a 4GB Solid State Drive (no moving parts). The folks over at the EEEUser site have been doing alot of hacking to their system. I think I’m fine with the default OS installation. I thought I was wanting a full-blown Linux OS but this interface from Xandros is very useful and I don’t need anything more than what is offered there.

This thing isn’t going to win any computing race. But when you think about the purpose of this machine, it does the basics at a quarter of the price of something similar in size. Don’t expect to buy this to be your primary machine. The screen is too small and it doesn’t have enough juice to be doing heavy lifting like image manipulation, video editing, or even documentation. But for the times when you just need a machine to quickly get onto the web or jot down a quick note, this is perfect. So for those who can’t afford a MacBook Air but would like a portable system, I ask you to consider this.