Portable (very) development system

[agraham]

You may or may not be interested in this but this is a very portable miniature development system that I have been putting together.

It is an Asus EeePC which has 512MB of RAM and a 4GB Solid State Disk together with an additional 8GB SDHC card for additional data storage. It comes with a version of Linux but you can load XP (or Vista) - mine runs XP SP2. At least one brave soul has Visual Studio running on his but there's not enough screen real estate for that really so I'm sticking to B4PPC. If you haven't come across the Eee I can tell you that you want one! They are cheap enough to buy one to play with (£220 to £230 in the UK) but are a full-blown laptop in a small package. Very impressive and very well built with a solid feel.

On the left a miniature optical mouse (although the built-in touchpad is as usable as such touchpads usually are) and my Dell Axim X30. On the right a USB CD writer/DVD-ROM reader with a USB 40GB Hard Disk on top. Both drives were free after upgrading my laptop and the USB cases were cheap from China on eBay. They only get plugged in when needed to save battery power on the Eee. In front a mini USB 56K modem also from eBay for PSTN connectivity. WiFi and Ethernet are built in, Bluetooth by a dongle.

It runs Office XP (Access, Word and Excel inc. the developer bits) for the boring things, Internet Explorer 7, Autoroute/Anquet Maps with a Bluetooth GPS tofind my way about, B4PPC and ActiveSync via USB for desktop and device development, ACDsee 9 for photo management and Corel PaintshopPro X for photo editing, Adobe Reader 8 of course and Chambers Dictionary and Thesaurus for help with crosswords.

I'm dead chuffed with this and if you were hesitating about buying an Eee then I can fully recommend it, it is absolutely amazing value for money.

 

[hung]

yes. it is light and more than umpc toys. my friend got the 4G white version (HKD2998) and he only brouhgt me for 2 minutes for playing the linux.

can your 8G run xp smooth, basic4ppc smooth and can browse internet smooth? u install xp by yourself? easy?

 

[agraham]

can your 8G run xp smooth, basic4ppc smooth and can browse internet smooth? u install xp by yourself? easy?

I actually have a 4G with an additional 8G SDHC card that I leave permanently in the built-in SD card reader so I have a 4GB C: drive and an 8GB D: drive under XP.

Yes, it runs everything very smoothly. The processors' delivered clock speed is 630MHz although the processor is rated for 900MHz and the delivered RAM for far more than that. It is presumably underclocked to get a better battery life but the speed is quite adequate for just about anything except gaming - the graphics isn't really up to that either. There is an under/over clocking utility here http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=8808 Mine runs well from 400MHz to 900Mhz. I haven't tried it but the slower speed supposedly gives about an extra half hour battery life over the normal life of about 3 hours if you are just doing normal office tasks

I installed XP myself. It was very easy if a little slow and there are detailed step by step instructions in the manual that comes with it. Asus supply the necessary Windows XP drivers on a DVD so you need a USB DVD reader to install them - or copy them to a CD on another machine if you don't have one. To install XP itself you need a USB CD reader although some people on the forum I gave above have managed without. The original XP release will not install properly but XP SP1 (which I used) will, although installing the SP2 update afterwards takes a few hours! It is easier to use an XP SP2 disk. You need to clean up afterwards to regain a lot of space and although there is a list of what you can remove in the Asus manual it is not complete. If anyone gets one and wants to know what I did then just ask.

There is a lot of knowledge (and a lot of misinformation too) on the forum.