I’d heard about them, but never gave them much thought till I saw a guy playing on his at a coffeehouse. Asus PC’s are tiny, adorable, relatively cheap computers. I dropped some subtle hints to my mother (i.e. saying “I want an Asus PC for Christmas”) but she’s concerned it won’t have enough memory. For my part, I don’t know much more about computers other than you stick a cord in them and voila! the internets.
My Q for the Dopers: There’s several Asus PC models, but which one would be best for me? All I really want is to be able to get wireless internet and maybe save some photos and music on it. I don’t play games like WoW or anything. How much memory do I need?
It will have enough memory. The thing to worry about is hard drive space, and unless you have massive amounts of videos downloaded you’ll be fine with that too.
My boyfriend got one for a “little carry-around” laptop. He’s got another one to do his real work on (video production - you probably won’t have the computing needs he does!) but he loves the little Asus.
I had a $150 gift card for Amazon and I bought this one (ASUS Eee PC 4G (7-Inch Display, Intel Mobile Processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB Hard Drive, Linux Preloaded) Pearl White). It was on sale for $279 at the time so it was like a $120 computer for me. It’s the perfect size for traveling and for sending pics home from the SD card. Our daughter uses it for the most part to do her homework on (typing word docs and researching online for the most part). I wouldn’t recommend it for anything more than casual use as the keyboard is atrocious (one could connect it to a USB keyboard though).
I would just recommend you get one with XP and not the 4gb hard drive. there are ones with 1 Gigs of RAM and 160 Gb hard drives with win xp. Get one of those (around $350-$450 on Amazon).
XP over linux because it looks like layman PC users are returning the linux versions in droves, simply because it’s a new interface to get used to. If you are familiar with XP, then getting one with XP will make interfacing with your PC second nature. Also, you’ll have an easier time when it comes to drivers and software you might want to run.
And 4 gigabytes is really not enough for anything other than web browsing and some light word editing. If you wan to store music and pictures + the OS you’ll want the 160 gig model.
I’ve got the 4G with Xandros and I like it but it’s not without fault. The 512MB of main memory isn’t enough, and most memory cards you stick in the slot will be much slower. The screen is microscopic and I can’t seem to scroll around on Google Maps due to the fact that some of the controls are off screen (This may have changed on newer versions of Google maps). The keyboard is tiny but usable for me. The big problem is that they’ve placed the up arrow key where the right shift key is and made the right shift key half-sized which is outright lame.
I’d go with the ASUS Eee PC Eee PC 900HA XP, bigger screen, plus 1GB main memory and a 160GB hard drive. I like Xandros well enough, but for inept linux people like myself, XP is way easier. It only weighs 2.5 pounds and is still pretty tiny.
I’m typing this on a 17" Vostro because the 4G is just too small to comfortably couch surf on. That said, the 4G is still a fantastic little machine for carrying on airplanes. You can comfortably carry it around all day long in a day pack.