Comments on: The Gizmo Report: an Eee PC in the house

Glaskowsky describes his initial impressions of the new Asus Eee PC.

[mhinnewyork]

Get a feel for an 800x480 display

To get a feel for how web pages look on an 800 by 480 screen, go to any web page and type this into the address bar

javascript:resizeTo(800,480);

When I do this on my monitor, the resulting window is 12 inches diagonally. Viewing this on a 7 inch screen, text would be very hard to read. Your mileage will vary - my screen is 19 inches square at 1152x864.
Michael Horowitz

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Wow, excellent

I have a couple of Javascript bookmarks like this:

javascript:nbr=prompt('Enter%20the%20name%20of%20the%20Wikipedia%20entry:','Text');window.location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'%20+%20nbr;

but I've never looked into the other things that can be done this way. That resizing idea is an excellent tip for usability testing.

Various Eee PC reviews have dinged the machine for the size of the display, and I'll be talking about the practical consequences of that limitation in my more detailed review.

Thanks for the note.

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[kkrewell]

Check the actual clock speed

I read one report that the Eee PC clocks the processor bus at only 70MHz, lowering the actual processor clock speed to 630MHz (even though it's a 900MHz Celeron processor).

Central Computer had a shipment at the Nov. 1 launch but quickly sold out. They still had a demo unit in the store, so I did try it out for a bout 5 minutes. OpenOffice seemed to work fine and task switching was fast enough.

[Peter N. Glaskowsky]

Seems to be 900

There's a utility to show the CPU clock speed, and it reports 900. I suppose it could be misled by bad clocking, but I doubt that's going on.

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[kkrewell]

Eee PC is also in MY house now!

I bought an Eee PC. I couldn't resist giving it a try and the price point wasn't unacceptable. So far, I think it's pretty good. ASUS seems to have built a pretty solid machine. With the solid state drive, I won't feel bad about bouncing it around. The WiFi works well. I still have a lot more to try.

[kkrewell]

A most excellent review of the Eee PC...

including Lunix hacks can be found on Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/eee-pc-review.ars/1