Perfect for portability and travel

I have been looking for a small laptop with Wi-Fi and Windows XP, that will fit inside the small safe in the staterooms on Carnival cruise ships. The Asus eee PC with XP is it! The Carnival safe measures about 10W x 9H x 8D inches; good for passports, medications, cash, PDA and other small items.

I did a lot of research on the Web, read reviews, and found some units for sale on Amazon, Best Buy, and other online stores. BestBuy.com led me to believe that the units were only available online, with no store pickup.

A few days ago, I was at the local Best Buy, looking for a part, when I discovered that they had some Asus eee PCs in stock. I bought the black eee PC 4G with pre-installed Windows XP. Their return policy was 14 days with a 15% restocking charge, if it was returned because I didn't like it. Seemed like a safe bet to me, so I bought it.

It was set up in minutes, most of the time performing the Windows XP user setup. The Asus functions as well as my other laptops,  more

ASUS EEE 4GB is good bargain

Although the screen is rather small, it works fine. The 4 GB solid-state drive is inadequate. I added 80 GB portable hard drive and a 8GB SD card. With these upgrades and desirable memory upgrade to 2 GB, the total price comes to $560. So, with these additions, the main factor going in its favor is its weight.

One lingering question! How to restore the MS/XP OS, if the disk crashes and a backup copy is unavailable? This is worrisome. Nothing came with the system to help in this regard. Linking with the wireless network was difficult. Announced upgraded models are steps in the right direction, but the prices are also going up. Overall, I found ASUS Eee 4GB is worth every penny of $400. Again, the main advantages are its size and feather-weight.

asus eee rules

I love this little thing. I use it to write papers and create powerpoint for nursing school. Warning though: the microsoft word and powerpoint programs are really inadequate. I downloaded openoffice, which is a free program (and had to remove microsoft office programs to create enough room in the 4gig hard drive), otherwise it wouldn't be useful to me. I understand you can get it with linux and openoffice already installed, and if I could do it again I would go that route. Also be aware that the SURF model, not this one, has the built-in camera and mic. Another issue I had was a malfunctioning spacebar (a common problem, I've read). I called customer support, sent in the keyboard (easy to remove), and they sent me a working one very promptly. Everywhere I go, people want to know what it is, and they want to have one. I use it almost exclusively now, even though I own two other computers. Boots up quickly, and I love the size.