Lovin' the Eee ...

A few days ago I bought an Eee PC as a travel computer for when we go overseas mid year. I'd not really used it until today when I'm stuck at home with a horrible drippy cold. Too sick to be at work and not sick enough not to be bored. And when I'm like that my mind wanders.

This time to the parallels between Scottish and Irish history in the medieval period, something sparked by this week's Time Team dig at Dungannon on the ABC.

And as I frequently do, I felt the urge to write myself an essay as a note in progress and post it too this blog. Seemed like an excellent idea to use the Eee, especially as the cat had installed himself in the study and I hadn't the heart to move him.

Into the lounge room. CTRL-ALT-T to open a terminal window and kwrite & to fork off kwrite which has been my favourite text editor for years, well at least 2006.

And I typed. And it worked. The small keyboard was perfectly usable for my somewhere between twofingers and touchtyping style, the trackpad was no worse than any other though I used a little travel mouse in preference (that just plugged in and worked as well). Create a directory, save the file. Just worked. Off to wikipedia to check something - again just worked, off to google docs to import the file, post to blog (the screen size was a slight problem, but I got there), off to the site to check the post seamless.

As a research and writing tool fantatstic. Small effective and powerful. Ideal as a note taker and a web terminal.

My only gripe would be battery life. Ok but not quite ok enough. Using I dropped from 90% to 30% in about ninety minutes. Not disatrous but could be better.

And I didn't mind the ooky goo either, after all it's a means of launching applications and as in the iphone it should be treated as such. The eee is a web and writing engine, not a full blown computer. It does however beg the question of how much power we really need as shown by my various adventures in low cost computing ...