eee pc

Robyn using the eee p on free wifi @ the DMZ cafe, Hue
image by sridgway

Itś our last day of our month in Vietnam. I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on the eee pc for those considering purchasing one for a OS sojourn.

I purchased the eee pc pretty much sight unseen for the trip just before we left. Add to that I am a newbie to linux so it was a an experiment all round.

After both Robyn and I have been using it for a month, blogging, editing images and uploading to flickr on largely free wifi networks I thought it would be a good to reflect on it' s strengths & weaknesses.

Overall it has been invaluable especially in Vietnam with such good wifi access and speed. Itś size and weight has meant I have been able to cart it around during the day and hook up to skype and check email for lunch or over a beer or 2.

As a traveler without a computer you mostly have to rely on the hotel computers which are often in high demand and poorly resourced. Most of the Hotels we stayed in were 2 star and the wifi signal was available in the room which meat we could do our work in the comfort of our room. The best was the Viet Anh in Hanoi which had a wifi router on every floor. For avid flickr users we wanted to edit & upload the days pictures at the end of the day. Most hotel computers had windows xp which does not have any image editing software installed. Robyn tried a few online ones to no avail. The eee pc has mtPaint 3.11 pre innstalled and proved more than adequate for the job of resizing, rotating and cropping for flickr.

The only 3 star hotel we stayed in had the worst internet access of all, and the wifi was wep and would not work. It had a swimming pool, which Robyn made the most of :> The higher the star rating the lower the network connectivity.

The downside, well when I got here it would not recognize any of our usb memory sticks, it was working fine before we left so a mystery as to why it fell off. Had to spend an hour looking @ geeky forums to fix it, but I got it working again in the end. Once you get away from the pre installed software things get geeky :<

I tried to install picas but would not work.

Other than this it has been a fantastic work horse, battery life about 2 hours with wifi on.

I would recommend it to anyone contemplating an OS trip.