Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Exclusive First Review: Asus Eee PC 701

Filed under
Linux
Hardware

This past weekend a circular advertised a Vista-powered laptop equipped with a Celeron processor, 14.1-inch display, an 80GB hard drive, and a DVD drive for only $399. For the same price, the Asus Eee PC (see the photo gallery) offers the same amount of RAM and Celeron processor but a smaller seven-inch display, a measly 4GB of storage space, and no DVD drive. And yet there's no way we would give up this two-pound wonder for a "regular" notebook. The Eee PC may be designed to appeal to children and older customers, but it should also tempt anyone looking for a lightweight budget PC that weighs next to nothing and connects to the Internet easily. It's ten times simpler to use than any Windows machine, starts up twice as fast (no crapware!), and is only about a fifth of the cost of other systems in its weight class. It's a little rough around the edges, but the Eee PC is a remarkably versatile machine for the price.

Refreshing Interface

The reason why the Eee PC should appeal to kids and grandparents alike is the streamlined, tab-based interface that offers only six easy-to-understand options: Internet, Work, Learn, Play, Settings, and Favorites. In some cases the Asus-designed menu (which runs on top of Linux) merely offers links to sites that Web-savvy users have already bookmarked, like Yahoo e-mail or Google Docs, but these choices are welcome for a target audience that may not be able to find these resources easily. We also appreciated the option of using these quick shortcuts, as opposed to opening the browser first. Users will love having a clutter-free desktop for day-to-day use and will likely find navigating the various options refreshingly simple compared with XP or Vista, as well as with Mac OS X.

Small, But Not Too Small




Asus Eee PC 701 Review @ c|net

There's a new player in the extreme budget market, and this one isn't intended for developing nations. Meet the Asus Eee PC 701 -- an ultraportable laptop that costs as little as £169. The three 'e's represent Asus' vision of it being "easy to learn, easy to work, easy to play".

The Eee PC is also available from other vendors including RM, where it's known as the RM Asus miniBook. We have reviewed Asus' £219 version here, which will be available to buy on 14 November.

Design

The Eee PC is one of the smallest laptops on the market. At 225 by 35 by 165mm, it's about the size of a hardback book, and weighs 920g. Its petite dimensions give it a toy-like appearance, but this is countervailed by the pearl-white finish, which gives it a touch of sophistication. Ultimately, the Eee PC looks equally at home on the catwalk or in a child's playpen -- it is what you make of it.

Full Review

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.