ey te et al

So this is my second post. (I guess I’ll stop numbering them when it all becomes more natural for me.) I’m writing this with my Asus eee pc which my wife bought me as a birthday present at the end of last year.

I really like this machine. I saw it in the press and immediately thought “I want one of those”. The problem was that this was the end of November last year and everywhere I looked, people were saying great things about it, but you couldn’t get one for love nor money. No one had one in stock, non of the regular shops, non of the on-line stores I use (also, in fact, non of the stores I’d never used!).

One store had a number in when I looked one day, but by the time we came to order it in the evening, they had sold out.

We were having a similar problem with a Nintendo DS lite for my nine-year old daughter. Again, you couldn’t get one anywhere. (At the time of writing this, we still haven’t got her one.) Anyway, we went into Toys ‘R’ Us for the Nintendo and there were dozens of the Asus eee pc for £219, which at the time was comparable to the prices quoted by all those ion-line stores which didn’t actually have them.

I won’t go into a long review of the machine. Suffice it to say that I have a standard 4Gb machine, still running the software it came with and I love it. It does the jobs of writing, internet browsing, emailing and the occasional Soduko perfectly. I’ve not had any problems with connecting it to wireless networks. (I was having to manually connecting to my wireless network, including typing in the security key, until I recently found the on-boot option in the network configuration, so I’m even happier.) Every SD card or Key I’ve inserted has worked first time.

The beauty of the machine for me is the boot and shutdown times - about 15 - 20 seconds in each case. I will pick the thing up and use it for just a short, simple task, then switch it off again.

Compare this to my laptop which can take 2 minutes to be usable from start, and when you switch off, can take several minutes to ’save my settings’ and ’shutdown’. Especially when the thing has decided to update the software on shutdown, leaving the office can sometimes be a slow and frustrating affair!  I know I can ‘hibernate’ my laptop, but this still takes a while to write the 2Gb of memory to disk and shutdown, and startup again takes quite a while.

So, here it is, the first post of the blog.  This is all new to me so I’ll keep it simple for now.  The idea of the blog is to periodically post articles conerning things I’m interested in.  This will be technology, gadgets and the like.