I have been examining the ASUS EeePC since February, and would like to share my experience and viewpoint on this popular tool. The good news is that it works as advertised. And the bad news? Well, see for yourself.

If you're the type of person who wants a tool that you don't have to tweak, don't want to hack, and can live with the limitations of the ASUS EeePC - as is - then you're gonna love this little sucker. Of course, the fact that most of the tools anyone could need on the road are pre-installed and ready to run makes the EeePC a desirable little tool to have. The one I have for review is pretty solid, even though I don't care for Xandros. And I may yet replace the pre-installed Xandros with gNewSense, to see how that goes.

Since I can't really gripe about how things work - the EeePC is definitely Easy on those tension headaches caused by fumbling around with settings all the time - I'll focus on the things I really don't like. My main problems are with some simple screen resolution issues, the failure to make a repository of extra software immediately and easily available, and the addition of some non-Free software where it was really not necessary.

The first thing is a fairly minor point. If you really want to configure Kontact (and maybe some other programs), you should first hook up your EeePC to a big monitor so you can actually work with the dialog boxes. I'm not sure if this is bad design on the part of the Kontact team, or an oversight in ASUS' engineering, but I really hate trying to configure my primary tool, only to discover that even the suggested work-arounds for the dialog boxes don't always help.

When it comes to screen resolution, I would like to have a lot more control than I do. Perhaps there is a hardware limitation or something, but I have a 19" flat panel that can do higher than 1089x736 (whatever it is). I should be able to have a much sharper image on my monitor than I do, but I can't change to a higher screen resolution without having to hack the system. O.k., I think it's a fairly simple matter of editing the xorg.conf file or something. Still, why should I even have to do that?

As for the repositories, I realize Windows users may not be used to having huge repositories of software available to them, but I sure am. In order to add any new software, you have to add some repositories, and then 'pin' your apt-get system to hopefully prevent problems. While I did manage to successfully install GCompris, an educational program for young students, a few other programs I wanted simply could not be installed. For one thing, I want my weather feed to display in the Kontact Summary page. That ain't happening. Maybe I got the wrong program name, but I just simply could not install the weather/news tool for Kontact's Summary page. A number of other programs failed to install as well.

Frankly, I think ASUS is shooting themselves in the foot by not offering a wider repository of packages to install. All a user can do is update the ones they have. B-O-R-I-N-G!!! In short, a user should not have to delve into the semi-geeky waters of apt repositories just to be able to add more programs than ASUS wants us to have. Oh, and by the way, I was crazy enough to run apt-get update... apt-get upgrade recently. I thought it might help to solve an annoying issue. Don't do that! Certainly not without backing up your data! The good news is that recovery works very well!

Now for the part that leaves me scratching my head. KDE and GNOME both offer basic PDF readers that perform their task reasonably well. In fact, I've never had a problem with either. So why did ASUS go out of their way to install the non-Free Adobe reader? I have no idea. Of course, you could remove it, but then you had better add some repositories and pin your system - and keep frequent backups of your data.

I have the same problem with Skype. Sure, I guess it's kind of popular. But it's a non-standard, non-Free platform. Why not use - or at least offer - a standard SIP phone? I can connect to my Asterisk system remotely using kphone or Ekiga. Yet, not one single soft phone - other than Skype - is available! Other than taking advantage of the test to call my Mom (who uses Skype), I really don't use that platform. I would much rather just use a good SIP-based softphone and keep going.

I forget now whether it is the diagnostic tool or the anti-virus software, but one of these seems to also be non-Free software. One more time! All together now, everyone! NO NON-FREE SOFTWARE!!! Otherwise, I think the ASUS is a fine tool. If someone gets either BLAG or gNewSense installed on one of these things - with working wifi - please let me know!