Re: So, you wanted a cheap notebook?

... and here is the exact link:

Buy 100pcs at $150 from alibaba, or 1pc at $399 :)

Notice the comments on the end where someone speculates that it's an ARM processor, and then another says its MIPS. At any rate, apparently not an x86. Which is not the end of the road, but it is somewhat nice that regular Debian binary packages will often run on the EeePC, though customizing them is sometimes an improvement.

I have to apologize. I had a total brain fart while writing the above. The post I replied to clearly said "sold at the same price as the Eee" and somehow I halucinated "Sold as the EEE." D'oh! Sorry about that.

Note to self: next time, smoke the crack *after* posting...

;) In the drug binge of life, some of us are the mirrors, some of us are the razor blades...

You talk about it like it's something that might happen - well, it already has happened.

The Eee does not compete with budget laptops, it is in the ultraportable niche. Its only real overlap with mainstream laptops is with ultrasmall offerings like the MacBook Air, ThinkPad X series, Sony ultra-small Vaio, etc. Those machines are typically in the >$1500 price bracket. Certainly you will not find one for under 2x the Eee's price.

Simply the large number of essentially identical competing products coming on the market (keep reading engadget.com and you'll see a new one announced every few weeks) indicates that this niche is already something of a success.

Well, not out here. The mobile computing platforms I see are 90%+ Dell, then some Sony, Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo or the occasional ruggedized laptop such as my Durabook (but those are very rare).

That high price is why they aren't more popular. Hopefully the Eee will make a dent here but it would have to be available at local stores. And the popular apps must run on it. For some people that would be stuff like TurboTax, for me it's CAD.

I never had a doubt that ultra-portable has a market. Remember the Contura Aero? It was a success but could have been a much bigger one if marketed right. To me (and a lot of others) one key is battery runtime. The usual 2-4hrs simply don't cut it. If they can't get there anymore (the engineers in the 980's could ...) then the only alternative is to use standard rechargeables and that would be AA.

On a 7" screen you want to run CAD?

That's not the kind of application this machine is intended for.

Think of it as an ultraportable _terminal_ that happens to be able to browse the web in a pinch, edit and compile code, read newsgroups, etc.

In actuality, I use mine as my main machine outside of work hours. But I do have a desktop available at home, I just rarely bother to turn it on.

Sure, done that all the time, starting in 1989. Old Wang laptop, 6" or so screen, sans backlight, IBM-XT resolution, whatever that was. While riding trains, airplanes or while sitting in a hotel room I designed rather large circuit boards for ultrasound machines on it. The trick is to become very proficient with pan and zoom. Oh, and that thing did not have a pointing device. Never needed one but the arrow keys were quite worn when I retired it for a Compaq Contura.

But it's needed for that. After the Compaq Aero was discontinued there came a huge void.

Well, us HW guys need to run our CAD :-)

I used to do that but began using a desktop again. Much more oomph.

There are subnotebooks with better resolution and more computing horsepower on the market, they just cost $2k and up.

EeePC costs $399. It's not intended to do the job of the more expensive ultraportables. But it's great for people like me who want a computer they can carry and can afford to carry, but don't have the "I must have a full engineering workstation on my knee" justification to buy one of those pricey toys from Dynamism.

Nor is it intended to do the job of a dirt-cheap 6lb notebook. I'm actually thinking of buying one of those for the times I want a bigger screen and an optical drive. But most of the time, what I want is something tiny enough that I'll have it with me when I unexpectedly need it.

As long as they slurp up a battery in under 5hrs those ain't worth $2k+ for me.

However, in the early 90's we had exactly that. The Compaq Contura Aero was ultraportable, could do the usual EE software back then, had an incredible battery runtime and was lower in cost than a full laptop. But

It only would have to run simple CAD such as schematic entry, simple mechanical, LTSpice or suites such as IAR or Keil. And nobody would expect it to be a rocket there, more like a Leatherman tool.

I download first with clive:

Ian

My EeePC?

I think it's using an mplayer plugin for firefox to do the job, but I'm not really sure because it just worked out of the box ;-)

I bet you could run most of what ran on that using one of the dos-box emulators on a non-x86 platform such as a GPX portable video game, PDA, or even _phone_.

Well, you said you didn't mind CAD on a small screen ;-)

Most consumer grade PCs do that as well but this is a biz version and didn't come with the usual "gizmo" software ;-)

What's noteworthy in this case is that the "just works" is achieved out of the box with the kinds of open-source alternatives being proposed here - mplayer plugin to firefox. all running under linux.

As for safety, booting a live linux CD with comparable out-of-the-box capability in a virtual machine and doing your browsing in that should do pretty well.

And can your PDA run standard linux or windows executables without recompiling?

Does you PDA have a full keyboard?

A C compiler that runs on it?

The EeePC is not the world's best laptop, but it's 90% of what a laptop computer is supposed to be, in a the form factor of a large PDA.

That's exactly the problem. And the reason why i do not have one.

AFAIK you can buy one.

So, can EeePC run stuff like DesignCAD-3D or other such Windows apps?

You do know that you can get Windows ones, right?

Yes, but cs_posting wrote that it isn't really suited to run those apps. Well, in that case it ain't too useful for me. The other two reasons are that the battery lifetime is not significantly better than on a Dell laptop and that CostCo charges $549 for the Eee while I can get a basic Dell for around $400. Which does run DesignCAD and all that.