Eee used to be a sweet brand

Seriously, what's up with the people at Asus and why are they so thoroughly raping their own brand? I'm talking of course about the Eee.

What started with a small revolution in the notebook-market, the tiny but nice EeePC, has now become pretty much a farce. First of all, what's up with the millions of different configurations of EeePCs? Can even Asus keep up with all of them? Secondly, it seems that every other new piece of hardware coming out of their factories now sports the Eee-logo. Every week there seems to be a new model or a new product called the Eee-whatever. It's getting a bit much in my opinion.

The original EeePCs were made affordable partly because they ran Linux, a modified Xandros-based version that provided a super-simple interface that even your grandma could use without much trouble, making them a good buy for the computer novice not only because of the small price. But it wasn't long before market forces pressured Asus enough to start offering new models running Windows XP. Fine, if people really wanna run Windows XP let them. I just think it kind of defeats the whole point that the original EeePCs were making with their sleak Linux-powered and almost idiot-proof interface. An EeePC running Windows XP is just like any other cheap laptop, only smaller and with inferior hardware. Plus, the EeePC-models running Windows XP are more expensive than the ones running Linux. The ones that are the same price and model-number although running varying OSes have differences in their hardware specifications, i.e. smaller and cheaper harddrive to pay for the Windows XP-license.

There are now desktop-PCs wearing the Eee-logo popping up on the market. First there was the EeeBox, which I kind of see how it would be useful. It runs Windows XP or Linux, just like many of the netbooks of the brand. And now there's a all-in-one touch screen PC called the Eee Top. I don't know much about it yet but apparently it runs Windows XP infused with something that looks like the Easy-Mode UI on the EeePC netbooks. Judging by this video it doesn't run all that well though...

Too me it seems that Asus are a bit dizzy by the success of the first Eee-branded products and now they think that anything wearing the Eee-logo will become a money-printing machine and by drowning the market in different models and products they may actually kill their own brand in the end.

I'm personally aching a bit for one of the EeePC 901s running Linux and I already own one of the original EeePCs, a 701 4G (with touch screen installed), but this flood of Eee-products leaves a bit of a foul taste in my mouth none the less

Getting down with my EeePC

I've been playing around a lot with my Asus EeePC 701 4G lately. Actually, I've possibly been playing a little too much even since I've had to restore it to factory settings three times after being a little too adventurous with it.

With great help from the excellent wiki and forums at eeeuser.com I've played with and tweaked my EeePC plenty. I've activated the full KDE desktop, modified many of the shell scripts controlling the hardware, overclocked the CPU (which also included installing new kernel modules and playing with the fan-settings), compiled new kernels, done some network-hacking with Wireshark and aircrack-ng and much more

Last night I took a shot at enabling some 3D goodness by installing Compiz on the little beast and, low and behold, it actually worked!

As you can see it does indeed work, and pretty well at that! Very impressive for the modest hardware of the EeePC.

However, with a screen resolution of 800x480 the wobbling and bouncing windows get pretty annoying, and transparency doesn't seem to work (the thick black lines around all the items on the screen are because of this). The cube desktop switching is both cool and very usable though.

I have lots of neat projects lined up for my EeePC, one being installing a touch screen (I've ordered the needed hardware already) and other being using it as a wireless access point. It's a great machine to play around with and the Xandros Linux OS running on it by default is based on Debian which means I have access to a huuuge amount of pre-packaged software - very nice!

I'd recommend this machine to anyone in need of an extremely portable and moderately priced notebook PC for basic computing (e-mail, websurfing, word processing, etc.), or to any fellow hacker or gadget-freak that just wants an awesome new toy. Although it weighs less than a kilo and has pretty modest hardware, it still packs enough of a punch to fulfill most computer users needs.

The EeePC is simply awesome!!!