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.

It is what it is ...

Two things the eee PC is NOT: 1) It is not a desktop replacement. Silly to even consider it. 2) It is not a replacement for your personal laptop. (You'll never watch DVD's or load your iTunes library on it.)

OK, what good is it? I travel quite a bit on business and always have to lug my business laptop around and you know what a pain that is. But when I travel all I really need is: 1) Internet access to check-in for my flight. 2) Need access to the web for my email. 3) Need to do some lite editing on Excel, WORD, and Powerpoint. 4) Need to be able to read PDF documents. 5) Need an external video port and USB connection to run my Powerpoint presentations.

Given those requirements, this little guy is great! Plus, it supports my air card, and the preformance of my Slingbox player is really good.

Now that I have it, I wish I had spent the extra $150 and got the eee PC 900, but for what I need, it's awesome. To be fair, I've only had it a week, and haven't loaded MS Office (need  more

Great little machine

I was originally going to purchase the 2G Linux-driven product, but for a few bucks more decided on the 4G XP version. I am glad I did! I love it's portability and size (although typing at my normal speed is tricky.) and I was fully aware of what I was commiting myself to prior to purchase. There are NO unpleasant surprises. I wouldn't recommend getting this as a primary computer. I still have my home unit, but this one is great to take along with me.

Great little laptop for basic work

I already have a desktop computer together with a larger laptop. I was looking for a small and light computer which I could take on trips (I travel frequently) to check e-mail and access the internet. This little computer is perfect for these tasks. I specifically wanted this version since it has Windows XP installed (rather Linux) and is compatible with work-related software which I installed. Getting started was easy and setup is a breeze. On the downside, the screen is rather small and the keyboard is also very small. As I said, for basic e-mail and internet access, this handy little computer is wonderful. However, it is not designed for heavy duty business usage due to the small screen.

Great little companion laptop

I bought this for my wife as a companion to her desktop and work full-sized laptop. She found the laptop just too much of a pain to haul around for email and office doc access while on the road. The Eee PC was attractive for its low cost (since she already has 2 computers)and portability. I chose the XP version, since I am not experienced with Linux, and wanted to ensure some ability to do maintainence myself.

The computer comes with quite a bit of junk preloaded that I simply don't need, but it was easily removed, and some people might find it useful. The main weakness of the software bundle is that it includes Microsoft Works which, let's face it, is almost useless if you need to interact with grown-up office apps very much. I quickly downloaded Openoffice.org, a powerful... and free... office suite that offers good compatibility with MS Office (I use the Novell version that supports office 2007 formats).

Both XP and Openoffice.org run quite well on this mini-laptop.

The only  more