Review of the Asus eee PC 1000

I am always looking at ways to use technology to improve the way that I teach. I decided to venture into the realm of netbooks. The combination of price tag and battery life was very attractive, but the amount of storage seemed rather limited. Then I found the Asus eee PC 1000. It has a total storage space of 40GB, an 8GB system drive and 32GB data drive. This seemed like a reasonable amount of space. I could store enough videos to show in class along with working my current projects for class.

As usual my initial reaction when I got it from NewEgg was this is cool. I liked the size and the battery life. The first day I turned it on with wifi and used it from 7:15am to 1:00pm before it started saying that I needed to charge the battery. That seems reasonable since I teach from 8 to 3. Since it was running Linux I was not sure how it would deal with a couple of things on my needs list. Here's my checklist of things that it needed it to do to help me teach more effectively:

• Play streaming videos such as from Discovery Education/United Streaming, youtube, etc....
  
• Streaming works ok but buffering needs to be fine tuned. It seems to worked best if I save it as an asf and play it using the media player.
  
• Journal/Writing software similiar to OneNote & Evernote.
• Jarnal works.
• Xournal works but make sure you have the latest version.
  
• Wacom Bluetooth writing tablet.
• This worked but not initially. I'll post more about this later but it appears to be working now.
• Surf the web wirelessly & securely.
  
• Works like a charm. Xandros wireless configuration is pretty intuitive.
• Transfer images and videos from my phone to the computer.
• Works but the video's do not appear to have sound.
• This works great for when you want to save what you have on the board but you didn't have time to setup the writing tablet or your smartboard/computer was not working.
  

Initially I was having issues with some of the software system updates. Things just didn't seem to be working such as the "Download programs" link, maintaining the connection with my tablet, and I didn't care for the user interface very much. So I decided to install the Ubuntu-eee distro, more about that later. Most things worked with Ubuntu but I was having issues getting the wireless working and I needed this in class now so I decided to put Xandros back on. I'm sure that I will re-install Ubuntu when I have more time, since I really liked it's speed and user interface better. Interesting enough the install from the CD seems to work better than the install that came on it. Most importantly the "Downloads Link" works now and my wacom bluetooth tablet appears to be working just fine now. Also the chinese software didn't install by default which is good and a few of the other apps available now. It only works in the mouse mode but I may be able to fix that.

As I was looking at the specs before I purchased the eee pc 1000 I noticed that the wired network port was only 10/100 which was disappointing since I have a HP 1800 Gigabit switch at home, but to my pleasant surprise it is actually a gigabit network adapter. I don't know why they don't advertise it as such.

In conclusion I would highly recommend the Asus eee PC 1000 40G. The biggest frustration is the right shift key is split, it is half the size it should be and the up arrow gets bumped a lot. The battery life is great along with the wireless reception.

Ubuntu meets ASUS F3Sa

As I mentioned in my previous entry I'm working on getting Ubuntu installed on my ASUS F3SA-A1 laptop. Initially I had some problems with the discs, I kept getting errors. I finally resolved this by burning the disc with ISORecorder on the laptop under Vista. The install appeared to have smoothly at first, but there were two major problems: the video and audio drivers.

The screen resolution was 1024x786 not the full wide screen resolution. Upon further investigation this was due to the fact that XF86 was using the vesa drive instead of the ATI Radeon driver. After several failed attempts I finally got it working using ENVY a handy little utility that can help you install ATI and NVidia drivers for XF86.

The next issue was getting the sound to work. I'm still working on getting it to work completely but so far I've at least gotten it working via a suggestion from Luke Hollins to set model=lenovo in the alsa-base file which doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it works. I haven't tested the mic yet. The speakers work but not the headphone jack. I'll have had a chance to test the micphone yet.

I've been installing Linux since 1995 and found Ubuntu to be the easiest install so far. It feels a lot more responsive than the previous install of Vista on this computer. I was even able to get a few windows applications installed with Wine. I'll post more about that later.

At this point the todo's are as follows:

• Finger Print reader
  
• WebCam
• Explore the TurboMemory options
  

ASUS Laptop Adventures

I've been looking for a new laptop for my wife for the past 6 months. I knew what I wanted for performance and what I wanted to pay. To problem was that the two concepts were not getting along until I finally spied an Asus F3sA-A1 from Newegg for $999 with a 15.4" screen, 2.2 Core 2 Duo (T7500), 1GB ram, 160GB drive, 512 Video Ram, Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless ABGN & bluetooth, & 1GB of Turbo memory. The memory was low but it came as only one stick so I could easily upgrade it to 3 which I did. The core features were there along with a few extras that I didn't require like N, Gigabit, and 512 video ram. I was looking for at least 128 video RAM. We'll have had the machine for almost a week and here are my adventures and reactions so far.

Initially I turned it on with 1G of ram just to see how Vista would perform. As expected there was a lot of swapping going on in the page file. The Windows Experience Index was around 4.5 because of the memory which is DDR2 667. When I upgraded the memory to 3GB it increased the index value to 4.7 which was the of everything except the processor which is 5.1. I finally dug around to try and figure out what this Tubro memory is and found it on Intel's website. It is a large cache of either 512MB or 1GB of SSD memory that helps the hard drive work more effectively.

Since my wife is willing using Linux and doesn't care for Vista. I started rummaging around to see how things were configured. I'm a debian fan so I first tried booting with Debian Edgy and it didn't find the network drivers out of the box which I thought was a problem that could be overcome by finding the right module but I thought this would be a good time to give Ubuntu a try. So I downloaded the Install/Live DVD from Ubuntu because I read on a blog that they got it to work with no problem on this laptop.

Next I started looking around at the partitions to see how they were configured. I found that there is a 6+ Gb at the beginning of the drive which I correctly assumed was for restorations. Since I purchased Vista I didn't want to get rid of this. I started searching for a partition backup solution. Initially I looked at Ghost because I was familiar with it. Since there were a bunch of bad reviews that I saw on Newegg. I returned to the open source options and found DriveXML & Clonezilla. DriveXML isn't open source but it is free and several reviews spoke highly of it. Initially I created a backup using this but the restore process looked cumbersome. That's when I stumbled upon Clonezilla which is based on a bunch of Open Source tools and a Debian live CD.

I downloaded the Clonezilla live CD which was less than 100MB. I used this to backup my OS partition and the hidden partition which it reported as vfat to the data partition. Next I transferred this to an external drive which I could have done initially but I didn't have access to it at the time.

Well back to the hardware. The laptop came with a finger printer reader which makes logins super simple. It also came with a few extras such as a nice little case, screen cleaning cloth, and small mouse. With Vista there are some excellent options available for adjusting the screen to your liking.

The biggest problem with the computer so far is the batter life. It only appears to have about 2 hours which is pretty unacceptable. But for the price and portability I was willing to sacrifice that for how my wife will be using the computer. It will mostly be a home computer that will be travelling on occasions.

At this point the machine is backed up and ready for the Ubuntu install. I'll post those in my next blog.