I blogging from my new Asus EEE PC 900. I'll just be up front and say that I love this little thing, but I will try to keep my opinions unbiased and just present the pros and cons. First the obvious things.

Keyboard:

Is the small keyboard a hindrance? It depends on how large your hands are and how well you type. If you hunt and peck then you probably won't have a problem. If you are a pro typist get ready for a slight learning curve. A few buttons are out of place at first glace, but it's pretty easy to get use to it. The Windows version has a Windows Key and the Linux version has a Home Key that when pressed minimizes open windows so the Desktop is visible, but we will talk about that a little later.

Touchpad:

The actual touch part of the touchpad is not different enough from other touchpads for me to even notice. The buttons are not as wide as I would like them to be. Many times I find myself trying to click the case right beside the left mouse button. Also hovering over an option in Firefox will select and click that option which is very aggravating.

Speakers:

I've noticed not a lot of people really talk about the speakers on the little system. They are not bad speakers at all, but the placement was not well thought out in my opinion. They are on the bottom of the system so the sound is often muffled and hard to hear even on 100%.

SSD:

This thing is awesome to me. A hard drive that doesn't have moving parts is really cool to me. I understand it's a dignified flash drive, but I still think it's cool. I thought that when you bought one of these you had the hard drive it came with forever, but a screwdriver and four screws later I found I was incorrect. You can replace the SSD with a larger one. Newegg sells them for what i would call a reasonable price, but that is neither here nor there.

RAM:

Not much to be said here. Mine came with 1gb of 5300 normal laptop RAM. Easily upgradeable as well.

Screen:

I have bad vision so I was afraid that I was not going to be able to see the screen, but I was surprised to find that most things are easy to see and read. I am having trouble reading this as I write it, but most text is normal size. It has very good resolution at 1024x600 which you can change a little, but not much.

OS:

I bought the Linux system since I thought it wasn't much system to run Windows and also Windows seemed to require more of a CD-ROM than Linux. First of all the OS seems to be geared towards people in school. From preschool into college. You can keep the OS you have or you can switch it to what many call "advanced mode" which is just Xandros 4.0.

EEE Download:

If you do keep the original OS like I have then you will find you do not have much software out of the box. This is where EEE Download comes into play. A lot of people online say not to use it, but I haven't had any trouble out of it. It's very easy to use and there is even a link to it on one of the Desktops of the OS. It's very well set up and easy to use. The keyword associations are very well set up so if you are use to windows you can find linux alternatives very easily.

Overall I give the system an 8.5

It's a very good system, but a few updates it will be an easy 10.

I run Ubuntu on my desktop and Xubuntu on my laptop. I really like Ubuntu and I try to give it as much credit as possible, but I have to say that since the last release I'm not so pleased with them. I upgraded to 8.10 on my dekstop and left my laptop at 8.04. Here is the rest of the story:

Desktop:

I downloaded 8.10 and was very excited because I've always had something better with every release of Ubuntu, but this time I was let down before it ever finished loading. Clearly I had some bad ram even though other versions of Ubuntu and distros of Linux installed and worked just fine. Being the fan of Ubuntu that I thought I was I shrugged it off and ordered new ram.
New ram comes in and 8.10 installs with no more problems. Alright, we're cooking now. Everything is going to be awesome...right? Not much seemed to change on the surface which isn't bad at all. I like things to stay in the same places and look the same from release to release. I open up Firefox to start doing a little research which is pretty common practice for me. I really like to think I can multi-task so I use tabbed pages a lot and I really like keyboard shortcuts so I got to press ctrl+t. When I do I get about 5 empty tabs. My responses seem to be related to how long I hold the key down and this is new to me. Not just in Firefox are they related, but also in the terminal when I use tab completion. This is very annoying, but they are all things I can live with.

Laptop:

This is the problem child. I have a Toshiba P205 laptop that I really dislike, but it gets the job done. I run Xubuntu on it because I don't like waiting for things to load. Since the 8.10 release (I'm still running 8.04) I have been getting an excessive amount of updates all at once. With every reboot I lose more and more things. I first lost my toolbar button for my volume. Not a bit deal really I just used alsamixer. Then a couple of weeks later I lost sound all together. Now I can't watch flash videos in Swiftweasel. It's really starting to become a pain, but I have a solution.

Conclusion:

I really don't blame Ubuntu for these issues. Let me just get that out of the way right now. I really think Ubuntu and I think the company behind them is doing great things. I just don't have the patience to let these bugs get worked out at the moment. My solution is to simply try out other distros. Pretty simple solution huh? If any of you have any recommendations please let me know.

I would like to start out by saying I dislike Microsoft. There, I said it. It's out in the open. Putting aside my disdain for Microsoft I've noticed that more and more companies are selling alternatives to Windows. Not just the small European companies like before. Now we're talking about the big guys like Dell and Wal-Mart. People have always had OS wars. It's nothing new with Linux vs. Windows vs. Mac. This has been going on since before the C64, but now these wars seem to have some legitimacy to them. Wal-Mart now carries a line of PCs from a company named Everex which run gOS Linux. Dell is also selling PCs with Ubuntu Linux, RedHat Linux, and get this...FreeDOS! Dell is actually selling a low end PC that's running an alternative to MS-DOS. How crazy is that? People can deny it all they like, but Linux as a mainstream desktop OS is on the horizon and Microsoft knows it. I'm stunned by the marketing gimmicks they are using just to stay on top. I mean Seinfeld? Come on, nobody cared anything about him once they saw more than the poofy shirt episode. The other commercial I see a lot from our OS "Big Brother" is wrong on multiple levels. You know, the one where they "disguise" Vista to look like a new upcoming Windows release? First of all there's no way they are tricking anyone who has actually used Vista. Secondly, they are lying to people publicaly to sell a product. you be the judge, but in the meantime check out some links I've compiled for you.

Dell:
FreeDOS and RedHat

Wal-Mart:
Everex

gOS

Ubuntu

FreeDOS

Youtube: Seinfeld Commercial

Youtube: Mojave Experiment Vista Commercial