REALLY tiny laptop

Well, despite some very reasoned (and reasonable) advice and insights from Four-Tower, I used some work money to buy myself an insanely small laptop: the ASUS eee.

The first laptop I've ever owned, by the way (although my wife has had two, including her current one).


My reasoning for getting it was as follows:


The point of a laptop is portability. To this end, this laptop has a keyboard and screen that's **just** at the thresh-hold of useability (at least, for my adult male -sized fingers). But, I figure it's scaleable (the I.T. term for ''expandable''): you can always jack in a regular-sized USB keyboard and an external monitor for ''at home'' use.

You can see in the photo how TINY it is, relative to my wife's laptop -- which is itself the smallest ''normal'' type of laptop you can get.

Sure, it has less horsepower than what's standard for today: only 800MHz, rather than the two-point-whatever gigaHertz processors; and only 512MB of RAM. But one of my PCs at home has those specs, and it's been perfectly fine for word-processing, web surfing, checking e-mail -- and even doing statistical analyses (since the sample sizes have been reasonably small -- less than 8,000 cases).

The ''hard drive'' isn't really a ''hard drive'' -- it's solid-state, flash memory. Thus, no spinning disks, so less power consumption. That means you can get the same battery life out of a physically smaller battery. Plus, the boot times and software loading times are faster, since there's no ''seek time'' for the spinning disk.

The ''solid state hard drive'' is only 4GB -- with only 1.3GB available after the operating system and installed software. But again: expandable. It has a slot for a memory card -- so if you jack in a 4GB photo card, you now have 5.3GB at your disposal. (Note: If you do this, it's not a unified drive of 5.3GB. Instead, it's like two partitions [or two separate hard drives].) Or, you could jack in your USB flashdrive/pendrive, and expand the memory that way.

It has a built-in mic, webcam, and wireless internet. Plus "office" software (word processing, spreadsheet, "Powerpoint"-type software), plus a bunch of other stuff. AU$498 (about US$400).


Part of the reason that it's so reasonably-priced is that it doesn't use cutting-edge processors -- as mentioned earlier, the 800MHz and 512MB RAM -- far below what's ''normal'' for a new laptop today.

The other reason, though, is that it doesn't pay hundreds of dollars in licensing fees to Microsoft. I've heard that on a new PC with Windows pre-installed, US$200-$300 of the costs of the new computer is the licensing fees to Windows. Instead, the ASUS eee uses a ''flavor'' of Linux -- another operating system (much as Macs use a different OS compared to Windows; this is yet another option). Given that it's icon-driven, it's no weirder for a Windows user to figure out than it would be for a Windows user to borrow someone's Mac: same logic, just that some things are kept in a different place than what you'd expect. (Kind of like borrowing someone else's car: OK -- **where's** the hood release? **Where's** the windshield wiper switch...?)

Similarly, instead of MS Office, it uses OpenOffice.org software -- which, pragmatically, is about 90%-95% as good as MS Office. Microsoft has more money for R&D -- but as long as you're not doing insanely complex formatting, things will work just fine. And you **can** save your files in MS Office compatible formats (*.doc, *.ppt, *.xls).



To pre-empt GC's possible complaint -- I **do** think a novice computer user (e.g. his Farm Girl) could figure it out pretty quickly. There's four or five tabs across the top. Word processing, spreadsheets, etc. are under the "Work" tab; e-mail and web browser are under the "Internet" tab; the webcam/video recorder, games, and audio recorder are under "Play". And etc.


This final photo givess another indicator of size: Folded up, the laptop is 2/3 of the size of a CD case. Wow... :)

A laptop computer that can fit in an overcoat pocket...


--GG