ESP Projects Ltd: IT Support - Sheffield

Allow me to introduce you to Asus's AMAAAZING 7” Laptop, AKA the EeePC. The EeePC has received rave reviews from CNET as well as it’s countless users, so when our suppliers let me know that they had stock coming in, naturally I was keen to get my hands on one!

The device itself is incredibly small and light, and charges in a couple of hours. The first thing that regular laptop users will notice is the lack of a lid catch, but despite this oversight, the build quality is actually pretty reasonable. The keyboard, at about 1/2 size of a regular keyboard is just big enough to be operable by most people although the layout is different at the fringes and this does kind of throw out your alignment if you touch-type a lot. The screen is also slightly too small to fit some websites on, but the cursor keys allow you to scroll quite effectively around pages that do not fit.

Boot-up time is very quick – much faster than my regular laptop, and the running speed of programs is truly astonishing. That's in large part due to the custom Linux operating system. After putting in your password, you are presented with large icons grouped into Internet, Work, Learn, Play and Settings. This is so easy to use that one of the main target audiences for the laptop is children. That said, all the tools a professional adult needs are here too – Open Office gives you spreadsheets, presentations, word processing and even databases; Firefox and Thunderbird are there for internet and email; and various media players are available for everything from MP3 to DVD's. Connectivity is very good, with network, WIFI, VGA (for an external monitor) and 3 USB's available. This means that the only things you might miss from a regular laptop such as optical drives or a larger keyboard can easily be plugged in. It even features a built-in webcam! Storage space is really the only thing missing here – the solid state hard drive has only 1.5Gb free and whilst this can be topped up with an SD Card, I found that you get prompted about the content of that card at every boot. Still few people these days actually need to carry many files around, and there is plenty of room for regular Office documents.

To be honest, when I first starting using this marvel, I thought it would be a useful tool for surfing the web, checking email and typing up Word documents when on the train or at meetings. But a few days in – and with a little tweaking – I found the 'Full desktop' setting. This gives you a full operating system environment, not dissimilar at all to Windows, but with all the flexibility of Linux to change settings and download and install the programs you want FOR FREE! In either mode, detection of printers and peripherals was excellent. Suddenly it dawned on me that what I had here was actually a direct replacement for my laptop. I plugged it in to my docking station, and lo and behold – it was now running a 19” monitor and external keyboard!!

Just when you thought it couldn't get better, I'll let you in on secret – the price! At about £200+VAT, this is the bargain of the decade. Not only is it a quarter of the size and weight of my usual laptop, but it's a quarter of the price too. With no additional outlay needed for Microsoft Office or AntiVirus protection, and a performance for everyday tasks that will shame most Windows XP machines, this really is the future of personal computing.