Cliff Saran’s FUD blog

I have been using the eeePC for aboout a week. I set it up last weekend and took it over to Pau, South West France for a two-day event with Telecoms Sans Frontieres. The machine worked remarkably well. I was able to produce new written, audio and picture content for ComputerWeekly.com from the event. The SD memory slot made it easy to copy images from my digital SLR camera to the eeePC. WAV files recorded on the CompactFlash mempory card of a Marantz podcast recorder could be copied to the eeePC using an external USB card reader. Email via Gmail was simple to setup in the Thunderbird email client and images and sound files could be uploaded using Firefox.

The eeePC ran Audacity for sound editing and Gimp for editing images. Using a touchpad with these packages is difficult but usable. And both would have benefited if the eeePC had a much larger screen.

But, given its size, the eeePC was usable. Editing sound and images was slower than a desktop PC – mainly due the small screen, the touchpad and the relatively slow processor – but I was still able to upload edited JPEG images and MP3 podcasts onto ComputerWeekly.com relatively quickly.

My only gripe was battery life. I barely got two hours's batter use out of the eeePC.