Here at bitcolumns we thought it would be funny to see if Sam, who is a self confessed computer addict and heavy user, could last a whole week only using a ASUS Eee PC S101 instead of his standard Dell XPS laptop.

Sam will be keeping a diary of the week as it happens, on the S101, and hopefully we will see if it is possible for a heavy user to move entirely to the new platform.  Unfortunately, we have had to make 2 exceptions to this:

• Sam may use his XPS for editing the video for the bitcast (but all research must be done on the S101)
• Sam may use his normal computers when at work, to not stop the running of the school.

These exceptions make sure everyone continues to run smoothly as we transfer to our new design, and features.

Day 1 (Saturday)

I have to say that today was an easy day for this challenge, with me being at work for most of it. But… the S101 did come into it’s own during the day. I took it to work with me, so was easily able to turn it on (very quickly, I must add) and do some writing whilst eating lunch. On my normal laptop this would be awkward due to the size, and battery life on performance mode. The small size of the S101, and ridiculous battery life, allow this sort of thing to become normal.

The evening was strange though, as I am used to sitting at my desk working on the latest bit of writing, but as I write this, sat on the sofa in my parents’ lounge, I am quite easily able to enjoy the comedic stylings of Michael McIntyre at the same time. (In fact I laughed so much at one point, I almost dropped the machine.)

Day 2 (Sunday)

Today was the first true test, as I was not at work. This meant lasting a whole day without any other computer. The morning was great again, being able to sit in the lounge with my family whilst working, but the screen got a bit annoying when it came to checking my Twitter feed. As those of you who use Twitter know, the site relies on scrolling down to read the ‘tweets’.

On the 1920×1200 resolution of my XPS M1530 this is really not noticeable, as most of the posts appear at the same time. And even on my iPhone it is not agravating, as the interface is intuitiave. But the Eee PC S101 has no scroll bar (that I could find) making it frustrating to have to keep moving the mouse between the scrollbar and the links in the posts. I had to give up on persevering, and changed to the iPhone.

Spending the rest of the day watching films and comedy DVDs meant that is all the use the S101 got. Oh well, let’s see what happens tomorrow.

Day 3 (Monday)

The first day back in the IT office after starting the challenge, and I have taken the S101 to work. The guys in the office love the machine, or at least most of it. The slender, stylish design appeals. but they are slightly taken aback by the price (we just bought loads of higher spec, 15.4 inch Toshibas for about £250 each).

As the rest of my work has to be done on the desktops in the office, the Eee PC went away after about half an hour. The S101 was so easy to just place on top of my desktop’s tower, to keep it out of the way. I have to definitely mention this machines portability and ruggedness. No problems at all with carrying it around with me whilst doing this article. Admittedly I am carrying it in the protective sleeve in the bag I use for all laptop’s.

Home time means a return to using the netbook. I am getting more used to it’s layout, but trying to type a long piece of work is interrupted every so often by me having to rewrite a sentence. Not because of the size of the keys, but the awkward placement of the laptop’s Shift key (to the right of the Up arrow). This irregular placement leads to me writing new words in the middle of previously finished sentences.

Day 4 (Tuesday)

Tuesday is always a busy day for me, and today is no exception. It is the 20th of January, and the return of the bitcolumns radio segment after the break for Christmas. I spend most of the day travelling between destinations, and researching the topics and news for the evenings show. I find myself sat in an on campus Cafe at 16:00, drinking a cup of hot chocolate (It was very cold outside), and typing up the ‘script’ for the evening’s show, when Andy joins me.

As some of you may know, Andy loves the Eee range (ussually becuase of their use of open source software), and this time is no exception. The only problem he can see is the running of Windows XP on the device (something I prefer).  Soon it is time to head to the studio, and the laptop slips easily into my bag, concealed from everyone. But it was nice to see a ‘Mac’ and a ‘PC’ sat in the corner of the cafe talking to each other.

Day 5 (Wednesday)

Today saw even more travel than yesterday. I agree to meet Guy (who presents on CSRFM) at 1200 so he can have a quick look at the S101, and give his opinion. Instead, I get a phone call at 0945 asking if we can meet at 1100 instead, as Guy has to drive to the west country. Not one to argue, or even question it, I drag myself out of bed and bomb it to Canterbury (maxing at 70mph of course).

I meet Guy at, a very unbusy, Starbucks in the city centre. Leaving him with the device to get a drink (another Hot Chocolate), I return to find out he has already ‘written’ a review in his head. Agreeing with myself on the fact it looks good, and is very fast for what it is, he also brings up some bad points I missed.

His first is the how attractive to fingerprints the outer shell is. It can easily get greasy, and start to look unclean if used a lot. He also points out a slight wobble on one of the hinges, we assume is from the number of people who have been carrying it around and reviewing it, but hope is not a sign of the build quality. Unfortunately we are not able to do endurance and quality tests on the build of the machine, but we hope that this is a one off.

Another point discussed is how attractive to thieves the SD card at the back of the machine could be. All it takes is a slight distraction, and people could walk away with a 16GB SD card. Hopefully this will never happen, but it is something we took into consideration.

Guy’s full opinion can be seen in the full review of the S101, coming very soon.

This afternoon saw us recording the first episode of the bitcolumns podcast (or bitcast, as we prefer to call it). We used the S101 to write the discussion points for the show, and you may even notive them as we show off the device on camera.

Day 6 (Thursday)

After a normal day at work, I had to get down to editing the bitcast so it is ready for broadcast. This of course had to be done on my XPS laptop, as the screen and processing power on the S101 are not quite enough for the heavy duty task of editing. This unfortunately means that I spent the whole evening on my XPS, even using the internet and MSN, etc. It seems that although the S101 is a good piece of kit, I could not resist the use of my standard machine, and therefore I failed the challenge. Oh well, 5 days is good enough. Isn’t it?

Conclusion

The Eee PC S101 was a pleasure to use when on the train (before the challenge started), or in a confined area. Giving enough power for tasks such as web browsing, IMing, word processing, and the like. But, and it never was going to, it does not have the power for tasks such as image editing and video processing, and this is where the XPS system really drew me back.

I would definitely recommend a netbook, not necessarily the S101, to anyone who travles by public transport a lot, or for long periods of time. The ability to work on the move without needing a dedicated table or worrying about charging is a definite plus, and stress relief. I would not recommend it for those of you who like to be able to do powerful tasks on a mobile machine.

Join us next week for: The Rock eXtreme 780 exclusive look, flash on the iPhone, and the $10 indian ‘laptop’.

Wanna keep up to date with the bitcasts as they become available? Subscribe to us on iTunes.

The Eee Box specifications:

1.6 GHZ Intel Atom Processor N270
Windows XP Home Operating System
Intel Chipset Motherboard
WLAN WiFi 802.11b/g/n and 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
1GB DDR2 RAM
WLAN: 802.11 b/g/n
80GB or 160GB HDD (Hard Drive)
SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro Storage Slots
DVI-Out/USB×4 (2 in front, 2 in rear) (Input/Output)
223×178×26 mm (Dimensions without stand)
Comes complete with ASUS wired mouse and keyboard
N.B. This system does not come with an optical drive (CD or DVD reader/writer) and an external one must be bought separately if needed.

The Eee Box will retail at around £200. BitColumns best price offer has so far been found at http://www.ebuyer.com/product/148886 for the Black Eee Box, and http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149899 for the White Eee Box.

The Eee Box is an innovative little desktop system. It’s mostly been created for the light PC user, someone who won’t intensively use their desktop system or doesn’t need to do anything intensive with their desktop. It itself is very small, about the size of 2 DVD cases stacked next to each other. This for a desktop PC is astonishing. It is also whisper quiet in operation. You would struggle to hear it even while using it to its maximum potential, despite this fact it doesn’t get very warm either.

The looks: It’s visually very appealing. Our particular test model was the black version which looked very nice and would fit well into any room in the house while looking stylish. The stand that attaches to the bottom of the Eee Box also has a designer look to it, and perhaps even makes the Eee Box look a little bit like a piece of art, but that’s a matter of opinion. Other than this the Eee Box is very minimalistic in looks. It’s just the box, a stylish stand and the WLAN aerial at the back. On the front is the on button, illuminated blue, and a front panel. This panel folds out to reveal the on button, the reset button, the HDD activity light, 2 USB ports and the card reader. The card reader takes a range of formats including SD/SDHC/MS/MS Pro so can be useful for permanent or temporary storage. And another last nifty little feature is that if you don’t want the Eee Box to be seen (and I don’t know why you wouldn’t, it looks quite cool) is that it comes complete with an attachment so that it can be attached to the back of a TV or monitor thus turning your TV or monitor into an all-in-one PC. And with the Eee Box being so small and light it becomes essentially invisible and can easily be taken with the TV wherever it goes.

What’s inside: Inside the processor is the same as the processor from the Eee PC 901, saying that it is a very good processor, it handles running programs, games, and the OS very well. The 1GB of RAM is also plenty of memory to keep the system running smoothly and efficiently. The Hard Drive at 80GB or 160GB is plenty of room for a home PC, for a light user. In any case the 160 GB hard drive is sufficient enough for any user. In any case 16GB SD cards are becoming very cheap nowadays and to buy and insert one into your machine as extra permanent data wouldn’t be very expensive. The wireless aerial isn’t too noticeable and is very good. It provides very good wireless connection, found in our testing, and finds connections, connects to them and stays connected very well. Some of the best wireless connections I’ve seen in a while. 4 USB ports is sufficient enough, 1 for a keyboard, 1 for a mouse and 2 others left for other USB devices, such as a printer or a USB flash drive etc. By now everyone should know what Windows XP is like, and it runs very nicely on this machine, having no problems at all. Having said that though any distribution of Linux would have run very much better and would’ve used the resources much more efficiently, which is why I favour the Eee PC with the Linux on. Also if it had Linux on instead the price would probably be less as ASUS would not have to pay for the Software License for Microsoft’s Windows XP (compare the prices of the Eee PC with Windows XP to those with Linux on). Having said that…

The Express Gate: The Eee Box features a feature called the Express Gate. This is where the Eee Box boots in 7 seconds (that’s right 7 seconds!) to a splash screen where the user can then access a few basic features very quickly, such as web browser, instant messenger client and some others. This will then load the user into a VERY basic Linux operating system which has the basic features such as web browser, messaging client, system options etc. available, if the suer just wants to use these basic features. However if the suer wants a word processor or any other features they must then go to boot to OS in the options menu. This Linux operating system is very basic keep in mind. Very basic options are available. It is quite easy to use, because it is so basic, however we did have problems with the wireless configuration to begin with, though these were eventually solved. It works quite well, but as we said it’s very simple so very hard to flaw. Windows can then be booted from here without having to restart the PC and can be found under the options menu.

Performance: We ran a few tests on the Eee Box to test the performance of it and we can say it performs quite well. The hardware inside isn’t top specced hardware, as can be seen from the price, however it is sufficient and works very well for what it is. It runs the word processor included with the OS (OpenOffice) very well and loads it up quite quickly. This goes for all the OpenOffice software. All other applications such as web browsers, file manager and media players all ran very well on the hardware and the system didn’t struggle with any of it. It even handled running multiple applications quite well for the hardware it was using. We then tested out a well know MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) called Guild Wars. We installed this on the system and ran it with minimum graphics. The game worked perfectly. SO we decided to up-step the graphics, it ran fine. Eventually we ran the game at top graphical mode, with the shadows and shaders turned down as they take up a lot of system resources and the game was working very well at high graphics mode (with the shadows and shaders turned down) with minimal (if any) lag. So the graphics and performance of this system are very adequate for playing mid-level PC games. We at bitcolumns were very impressed by these results.

So in conclusion we thought the Eee Box is a bargain! A very good catch for the money you pay for it. Only £200 for a very small, stylish, whisper-quiet and all-rounder PC that can be used for any day to day task and, as we found out from our tests, can play some mid-range games very competently. This would be recommended to: those of you who don’t use a desktop very much, for example you use a laptop mostly, and just need one as a base unit, to those of you who are very casual PC users and so don’t want to dish our £500+ for a PC, this is perfect and to parents for a child’s first computer, or for a teenagers computer as they are cheap, good build, small and have a decent specification. Overall another satisfying product from ASUS, cheap, stylish and small but best of all simplistic!

Score: 4.5/5

The most well known of these has to be the Asus EEE PC, with countless versions and promotion of being “Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play”. We recently have had an EEE PC 901 in the office, so let’s see if these claims are lived up to.

First Impressions

First impressions of the EEE PC were very positive. The size of the device lends itself very well to just dropping into a bag and taking it anywhere with you. The device is also very sturdy, seeming as if it could withstand quite a bit of punishment. Unfortunately we are unable to test the true extremes of the device.

The Important Stuff

As with any computer, you guys want specifications. So here they are:

Processor: 1.6Ghz Intel Atom
Memory: 1GB
Screen: 8.9″ Widescreen (1024×600 resolution. Perfect for websites)
Connectivity: Wi-fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth
Keyboard: Standard laptop keyboard (Small keys sometimes cause errors)
Outputs: VGA, Headphones
Inputs: Microphone, Touchpad, SD/MMC Card Port, 1.3mpx camera, 3 USB 2.0 ports
Bonus: Overclocking feature, Voice Recognition (more about that later)

The above features are the same on both variations of the EEE 901, but there are some differences. The most notable difference is in the Operating System (and storage), with one variation using Windows XP (with a 12GB SSD) and the other using Linux (with a 20GB SSD).

The use of a Solid State Drive (SSD) means there are almost no moving parts within the EEE PC. This helps with it’s sturdiness and resistance to damage form moving. The SSD also gives much faster read/write speeds. This allows the device to boot to Linux within 30 seconds of the power button being pressed. For a modern device with single core processor, and ‘only’ 1GB of RAM this is a blistering fast speed.

The EEE PC features an integrated Overclock/Underclock feature. When running on battery the processor is instantly slowed to 800mhz, this reduces power consumption and gives the EEE 901 it’s reported maximum battery life of 6 hours. But with the press of a button the 901 can increase it’s processor speed from 1.6Ghz to 1.8Ghz. This increase may seem small, but can mean a lot on the low demand applications preinstalled on the device. This increase in speed will, unfortunately, decrease battery life.

Next we look at the voice recognition. This technology never got off to a good start, and even now is known for it’s unreliability and hatred of accents. I myself have much difficulty, with a device always wanting to type Hallo instead of Hello. Now it must be said the the EEE PC 901 only uses voice recognition to allow voice control of the devices features, but the feature has been implemented wonderfully. Users can either press F10, or say Computer, followed by the command. Ranging from Calculator to Shutdown, the computer will repeat the command and then run the software. The computer voice has improved brilliantly from the EEE PC 700, to a point where the calculator response no longer sounds like Matt Damon from Team America World Police.

But every device has faults, and the EEE PC is no exception. We must report that we had network problems with our review sample, with the network often cutting out half way through loading a page. The network we use is tested and used regularly by laptops and we have never experienced these problems before.

The second was the keyboard. Unfortunately all the people we could get to test the device were male, so every one of them had a couple of teething problems getting their ‘manly’ fingers used to the smaller than normal keyboard. Asus will soon be releasing the EEE PC 904 HD, which comes with a hard drive and standard sized keyboard. If you would like the look and ease of use of the EEE PC in a bigger package, this may be what you are looking for.

Overall we see the device as a good companion for anyone who needs/wants to electronically record notes in a lecture. The small size, mixed with the ability to run full applications when needed, makes this a brilliant all-round low-end device.

Score: 4.5/5