EEE PC: The Experiment Continues

I've been continuing to use the hardy little EEE PC with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the 701 (4G) model netbook, and so far it's not been too bad.

Yes, the keyboard is still cramped.

But...it's the most portable little thing I've ever used, and the keyboard isn't an issue for extended use when I have it "docked" to a USB hub (with a USB keyboard attached).

Right now I'm waiting for a $65 battery to come in the mail. The current battery is giving me roughly 2-1/2 hours of charge at a time, which is probably average for an older laptop, but a netbook should give at least 4 (if not closer to 6) hours on a full charge. The production date on this unit looks to be around 2007, so I'm not too surprised at the reduced performance if the laptop is physically around 3 years old, even if it didn't get a lot of use before. I'll probably know more once the new battery comes in.

That means that my netbook is going to end up costing me roughly $80 with the keyboard and battery replaced.

I was hesitant to use this as a primary system because there would be limitations. Now that I've used it more, how does it stack up?

Fairly well, I was surprised to learn.

Fairly well in that I have aggravations, but nothing that makes me (so far) throw my hands up and give up. The limitations are a combination of technical and operating system issues.

The aggravations seem to be usability limitations of Linux at times. I'm saying that because most of the limitations I hit with Windows (and I'm a Windows XP fan out of the Windows family; I hate the arbitrary security and DRM limitations that are layered into each subsequent release of Windows with a passion) seem to be architecture and design issues. For example, when Windows gets infected with malware, the easiest, most thorough solution is to wipe the drive and start over. Most malware manages to get its hooks so deeply embedded into the Windows system (or mucking up your profile) that really anything else is a half solution.

Linux, not so much. It either works, or it doesn't. That's its major limitation. It was designed by geeks for use by geeks and damn anyone else...you're just not computer-friendly so it's your own fault.

What limitations am I running into?

I already mentioned flash movies bogging the system down. What do you expect? This tiny miracle has 512 meg of RAM and a fly's sneeze of storage space. I can play one video at a time, and I don't mind being patient when looking at things online most of the time.

Video. I hooked up my external 22" LCD panel to the laptop, and it sees it automatically. Yay! I have it arranged with the LCD in front of me and the laptop on the right. Now, ordinarily, you go into the display properties and tell it to put the big monitor on the left and the built-in display on the right and you're good to go...you can span the mouse across the desktops as if you have one big, wide display. Well, in theory this works. In practice, it throws my EEE into a tizzy.

It will detect the LCD and put it on the right hand side of the netbook, reversing my layout. If I try to put it the other way around, it seems to get confused with where to put the primary display (like the menu bar), and really throws the resolution into a tiz as well. Just totally confuses it. So I end up leaving it reversed and remembering to move the pointer the "wrong" way to get to the correct screen.

Second, there seems to be a slight discrepency in refresh rate. Sometimes it uses 60 hz, sometimes 75 hz. The effect? Anything on the LCD panel gets these tiny, fast moving "wiggles", like goose bumps on meth. It's the visual equivalent to a buzzing. Sometimes restarting the netbook seems to fix this. Doesn't seem to hurt the LCD, but it's annoying if you're looking at the display for long periods of time.

Mounted volumes. I have a 2 gig SD Card in the system to store my files along with 2 external 250 gig drives for backup (well, now semi-permanent storage) connected via the USB hub. The netbooks boots and sees them but doesn't always mount them automatically. I go to the files and folders panel and have to click them each once to get them to mount so I can use them. Why? I have no idea. I discovered it while running my backup script and having it throw an error at me saying that the external drives weren't hooked up even though they had powered up and were showing up in my drive display. The netbook saw them, but wouldn't mount them until I clicked on them. Worked like a charm after that.

These are the kinds of usability problems that annoy me with Linux on the Netbook. I'm reminded of them because I recently had a little project that I was working on; I'm trying to create a relatively simple Visual Basic program for someone where I work, and that means I needed to use a Windows system.

I decided to use the virtualized version I have on a MacBook (1 gig RAM, 2 Ghz processor dual-core, the MacBook black notebook) running on Virtualbox to use Visual Studio Express 2008.

I connected it up to the hub and monitor so I'd have a little more comfort while puzzling out the programming problem. The Mac detected the display and used the proper resolution without issue. It let me place it to the left side of the notebook without a problem.

The computer saw the two external drives but because they are Linux-formatted with the EXT3 filesystem, it couldn't read them, so it offered to erase them. Um...eject...eject...that's not a problem with the Mac, I expected this to happen. Didn't hurt them.

The Mac asked about my keyboard; I had to press two specified keys to identify it, and it was happy after that.

From there...things seem to just work. Display settings, keyboard, mouse...happy. The Mac isn't without warts, but it has more of the end-user experience ironed out, while Linux has more burps and hiccups along the way. It's sad because the Linux system is fantastically secure and capable, but when you run into issues with something that should be simple for the end user like arranging your desktops between two displays, it's extremely frustrating. Especially when I hook up a Mac and am able to alter resolutions and arrangement of displays without losing my desktop, my control programs (which I did on the netbook and had to restart it to have it redetect the proper display resolutions without the 22" display connected), or guessing where my programs went when it decided to place the programs off the display area somewhere.

I should not be afraid to change my display settings! With the Mac I'm not. With the netbook, there's always a little crossing of fingers.

On the other hand, the Mac is heavier, bigger, and not as portable (I guess the heavier and bigger parts sum up as being a little less portable, huh?). It has a spinning disk drive that makes it a little more susceptible to damage if there's a fall or bump, and the larger display increases the chances of having the LCD get damaged as well. Not cheap to fix!

Is it the ideal desktop? The jury is still out. I'll have more as I solidify my judgment more. Right now I'm using the Mac as a web browsing and Windows-virtualizing machine for the project, while my EEE is doing the day-to-day email and web browsing and editing of documents, so I'm comparing the two. But to this point so far the EEE has worked fairly well for the "average" use scenarios. I'd never try virtualizing anything on it, but I rarely have had actual call to do that...