Well I bought another eee. The fact that I bought one shortly after they first came out was pretty amazing. I am not normally an early adopter. I did wait long enough to buy one with an eight gigabyte solid state drive. I sold it shortly after purchasing it to pay for a new mandolin.
I really did like it though and intended to replace it when the time was right. I decided that I would let the new Netbook market mature a bit before buying another. I even waited to see what Dell was going to offer. I like Dell as both computers at my feet are Dells. The new one is pretty much just for work and World of Warcraft while the older model is for everything else like what I am typing now.
I thought that perhaps prices might drop, but I was surprised at how much. That first eee cost $499. Remember, they all had seven inch screens back then with the eight gigabyte model having one gigabyte of RAM. Now that same computer sells for about $270. For $20 less than I paid for the first one I purchased a ten inch screen, one gigabyte of RAM and a forty gigabyte solid state drive. It also has the 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor rather than the older 900 MHz processor.
I still bought the same Pearl White exterior and Linux. I do intend to give Ubuntu eee a try. I guess the next step is to decide how I want to go about installing additional operating systems. So I need to decide whether to buy an external CD/DVD drive or try the USB drive approach. I might to take a spare copy of XP and put it on a USB stick for those times when I need to access something with work, but that is a pretty low priority as I do have a company laptop for that purpose.
So what triggered this buy? I had really wanted to wait a bit longer before buying another computer, after all I think I want a Ukulele. I bought my daughter a Bushman BU7CM Jenny Concert ukulele with matte finish and it is really nice. Probably my most used device when not at home is my old Dell X30 PDA. Sometime go to the Dell website and price the stylus for that device. I broke mine recently and now that the pins on the bottom are bent I am having a very hard time plugging it in to charge it. Basically I see the writing on the wall.
I needed something that could do everything a PDA could do, spreadsheet, notes and audio player, but really did not want to spend $300 on a similar device that represents six to ten year old technology. I also wanted to get away from Windows Mobile and move on to the greener pastures of Linux. The Asus eee PC while a bit larger fits this task well.
Tim
