eeepc

Use It Better

Beef Up a Little PC

Turn the dirt-cheap, hardcover-size Eee PC into a speedy beast that can run any program or OS

If you want a super-light laptop, you have to pay for it, and you have to use Windows. That’s been the (frustrating) conventional wisdom—at least until late last year, when the Taiwanese company Asus rolled out the Eee PC (pronounced as though it were a single long “e”), a two-pound, seven-inch laptop starting at a mere $300. The tradeoff: It comes with just two to eight gigabytes of flash memory instead of a conventional, larger hard drive, and a simplified Linux operating system that essentially is usable only for e-mail, Web browsing and typing.

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Battle of the Ultra-Mobile Linux Laptops: Cloudbook vs. EeePC vs. My Old Thinkpad

How much portable Linux goodness can you get for $400?

Three of a Kind: From left to right: a four-year-old IBM Thinkpad X31, the Asus EeePC, and the Everex Cloudbook. Fight! Photo by John Mahoney
When Asus unveiled their ultraportable, ultra-cute EeePC in October of last year, they may not have anticipated launching a whole new product category, but judging by the overwhelmingly favorable reaction of users online and strong sales numbers, that's exactly what they've done. The slimmed-down, no-nonsense, Linux-powered ultraportable category that the Eee currently presides over, and that Everex's recently released Cloudbook hopes to capitalize on, is just one instance of a greater tech trend we're seeing across the board: an emphasis on shrinking form-factors and streamlined usage. In an industry that has always been about more power, more size, more capability—more everything—this is notable.

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