91–100 of 207 posts
Edit: it might have been a 901 instead - and I was too poor to get an 1k series
I had one of these! I brought it on a bicycle tour around Europe to stay in touch with my business, as I hopped on WiFi hotspots at all the McDonalds. I remember it being awfully slow but small enough to fit into the front bag of my bicycle, which is super, super wild now that I think of it.
My takeaway from the article: Microsoft gave ASUS a deal they couldn't refuse. ASUS took the bait and sold the Eee PC with Windows preinstalled but the version of Windows was a little too crappy. Ultimately this sealed their fate as people upgraded to a "real computer," resigning the Eee PC's position to that of a toy. Is this right?
Came preinstalled with Windows which I immediately ditched for Ubuntu. And despite my PTSD with linux on a laptop...everything worked! Even suspend!
Great battery life, super light, and surprisingly a great screen too. My main annoyance was how tiny the touchpad was and how loud the click buttons were.
Eventually I graduated and had a desktop at work. Later got a laptop and by then, the thinkpads were slimming down with decent linux support. Good times though - what an era.
The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even…
I know it will never happen but I'd love for Apple to bring back 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip and the newer keyboard. It would be perfect for light note taking/ productivity on the go.
The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc. The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even…
I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience.
The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing.
There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great.
So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase. What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep…
I don’t really have to reboot my M1 ever (short of updates), so booting is more or less equal to flipping open the screen.
I had one of these! I brought it on a bicycle tour around Europe to stay in touch with my business, as I hopped on WiFi hotspots at all the McDonalds. I remember it being awfully slow but small enough to fit into the front bag of my bicycle, which is super, super wild now that I think of it.
It was a traveling dream. You could do necessary PC things on it if you really needed to but it was painfully slow so you wouldn’t just spend time playing with it. It was absolutely tiny for it’s time so it fit in my backpack easily. It was a cheap piece of crap so I didn’t feel bad throwing it in my pack with dirty clothes and who knows what else and not have to worry about my $1200 business laptop. There really was…
I do remember the next time I rode a tour with a laptop (Paris to Amsterdam), I took my 2008 Macbook Pro. Survived the Paris Roubaix Cobbles!
I still remember the frustration that the screen height was so short (480px) that I couldn't reach the bottom of many ubuntu configuration panels.