The netbook is fast finding a comfortable niche as a second or even third computer. The majority of consumers seem to be buying them to supplement the systems they already own. I certainly saw the Eee that way when I first got my hands on one to review for Linux Journal. I already owned a 15” laptop for ‘serious’ use, and saw the Eee as a secondary internet device – much like a PDA or smartphone, but actually usable for light productivity and content creation.
The circumstances described by Moore’s law have ensured that our computers today are vastly powerful, with more memory on my graphics card than was in my entire computer only 2 years ago. Outside of gaming though, how much have my needs really changed? As an experiment, I decided to use my Asus EeePC for a day at work. I’m a Linux specialist supporting a large number of Linux servers as part of an exceptional team of Linux administrators. Most of my day is spent head first in a terminal window and processing requests that come in through email.
I used an Asus EeePC 701, with a 2GB SD card for extra storage and 2GB of memory running Windows XP Professional SP3. Yes, that’s the 701. With the 800×480 screen.
I’m afraid I was mercilessly mocked by everyone who saw me with my ‘toy’ computer. We’re all issued a certain brand of big, black, serious business laptop at my office and while my fondness for gadgets is already well known, it seems the EeePC was considered just too much of a toy for real work. It was absurdly dwarfed by the 20” monitor I had it plugged into while sitting at my desk.
What workedl:
Processing email was relatively painless, although I had to disable the preview pane on the 480px high screen and open emails in a new window to read them. My job doesn’t require much in the way of content creation, but I get sent a steady stream of relatively complicated Microsoft Office documents to read. The EeePC handled 30 page design documents heavy with images and tables with aplomb.
Accessing intranet sites was a little frustrating. If you want to find some of the least usable web design ever to be rendered, the internal tools used by a large corporate are pretty fair game. I spent a lot of time scrolling around, and sometimes discovering certain frame layouts just completely broke on such a low resolution.
When it came to what I think of as Real Work, things got a lot better. I don’t think the system requirements for PuTTY have changed in the last decade or so, and even a 7” screen can display an adequately sized console. I found I was maximizing console windows and alt-tabbing between them, but that this wasn’t anywhere near as frustrating as it looks when I watch the people in marketing use their computers in the same way.
I spent a few hours in the afternoon sitting at a customer site, and here I really enjoyed the Eee. I found myself perched on the corner of someone else’s desk, working through configuring systems with them. One terminal window open with many panes in gnu screen (<3) and I barely noticed the screen resolution.
What didn’t:
Using Citrix/rdesktop was about the most painful experience of my life so far, and that includes breaking bones and military service. By the time I’d nested multiple Citrix sessions (don’t ask) I was left with a postage stamp of window at around 600×300 pixels. Ouch.
The battery life really wasn’t great. I had to go hunting for a power supply only 2 hours into work on site. My work laptop might be a brick, but it’s a brick that can be fitted with dual batteries. I also found that while the screen resolution wasn’t unworkable, it was just that little slower and more frustrating and the multitasking penalty was a lot higher when I had to sort through windows trying to find where I’d left off.
At the end of the day though, I’d managed 8 hours of solid work without once needing to fetch my Regulation Issue Brick. I did however cheat. There are two applications I use in my daily grind that require Microsoft Windows – on the brick I run Ubuntu Hardy, and have a Windows VMWare session running when I need to use those applications. VMWare just wasn’t going to be an option on the Eee, so I installed Windows on it natively. Had I tried to replicate my actual working environment instead of the nearest equivalent the Eee was capable of, it all would have gone pear shaped a lot faster.
I’m still impressed at exactly how close the Eee comes to replacing a full-sized laptop for tasks that don’t require a lot of storage. With cloud computing as implemented by Google becoming the norm, the EeePC becomes far less of a toy and more a serious productivity tool.
