Asus Eee 700 Series

by Andy
(Brooklyn, NY)

I bought an Asus Eee PC in the Summer of 2008. It was the first generation Eee, and one of the first netbooks of it's size. For that reason it got a lot of attention when I used it in public.

People thought it was some sort of portable DVD player, and didn't believe it was a full-fledged computer. Even though that was only two years ago, netbooks really caught on, in part because of Asus' Eee computers. Nowadays they are ubiquitous in places like coffee shops and airports.

My Eee was originally running Xandros Linux. The OS worked well enough and it's small footprint made the computer boot and run faster than the ones running Linux.

However, after a year or so I found the OS to be a bit too basic, and somewhat limiting. I installed a customized Ubuntu distribution called Easy Peasy, and have been very happy with the results. The UI is very user-friendly, and uses browser-like tabs that help make organizing multiple programs simple, even on the Eee's small screen.

The original purpose for buying the Eee was that I was going to be doing some field work in India and needed something powerful enough to serve as a personal computer, but was also extremely light weight and portable.

The Eee's had just come out, and at the $400 price point I thought it was worth a shot, even though I don't typically by first-generation gadgets. The keyboard is a bit small, and there is very little disc space of the model I have (only about 8 GB). But after using the computer for a while I grew very accustomed to the size, and since I was only working with Office-type files (.doc, .ppt, etc.), the disc size was sufficient.

The computer came with 512 MB of RAM, which I upgraded to 1 GB, which has been plenty for my needs. Asus has made a lot of improvements to the line over the past couple years, but I have to say that I'm happy with the simple yet effective version that I own. I still use it when traveling to this day, and would recommend an Eee.