Did you ever get the Asus eee you said you were going to get?

I’ve had my Asus eee for several days now and I like it, I really like it. It’s $300 to $500 depending on which model you buy (mine was $350, via J&R Electronics, via Amazon). It weighs about two pounds.

Cheap, light and pretty-robust mini-laptop on the road is better than expensive, heavy and very-robust regular laptop on the road. If my regular laptop were lost or stolen it would be a more-than-minor inconvenience given not only the cost but also all the oodles of installations and settings. It’s also nice to be able to scoop up the light machine and take it to a local shop or just to another room, or across the room.

My previous mini-laptop was a second-hand MobilePro 900 that sported a restrictive 2000-era Windows CE operating system. I had to buy a wi-fi card to gain wireless access, then perform a magic spell to activate the wireless card. Nor was this solution stable. After leaving the MobilePro fallow for a few months, I discovered that the machine-plus-card had forgotten the magic. It didn’t seem worth the trouble to figure it out again.

Cheap-and-fairly-robust is better than cheap-and-gotta-keep-wrestling-with-it. The 900 has cramped programs and OS, and scanty memory. (And was cheap only because second-hand; the price was something like $900-$1,000 when it came out.) I gave up trying to solve the complicated process by which one could add new CE-compatible software to the 900. It does have uses on the road, but you cannot (or I, at least, could not) download and read an Excel sheet using the MobilePro alone. This would have made it hard to quickly do a job for the client who sends me data in Excel sheets. And even with functioning wi-fi, browsing the Internet on the MobilePro was a slog, too much of a slog.

To be sure, PCs are ubiquitous, as is broadband these days, and there’s usually a desktop wherever I’m going to be. But I don’t like to be too dependent on a machine that somebody else may need to use also and that is not tailored to my liking.

The Asus eee solves everything, as far as I can tell. Some reviewers complain about the small 7-inch screen and small keyboard, and also the touchpad. But on my machine these are responsive enough, and one can get used to the trade-offs. There are also fixes. The MobilePro has one USB port; the eee has three, as well as a monitor port. So it’s easy to plug in a keyboard and a mouse, even a flat screen if need be. I use a mini-keyboard that has its own trackball, making a separate mouse and pad unnecessary.

I too would like a bigger screen. But the one on my model is fine. You do have to scroll more than when using a regular-sized screen. But aren’t we used to scrolling through web pages anyway? The viewing area is certainly more than you get with a cell phone or PDA. Text might be a little too small when you first click into a page, but no need to squint, usually. To easily read a long article on the installed Firefox browser, I often switch to print mode and enlarge the text. You can also zoom the view in a word processor document.

Wi-fi is occasionally a little quirky, but not as quirky as on the MobilePro. And now that I’ve rigged “full desktop” (as opposed to the default “easy”) mode, at home the wi-fi seems to leap into action automatically. It’s also pretty stable.

The eee has a Linux operating system and comes with plenty of programs for standard uses, including Skype (for making phone calls over the Internet) and Open Office. Instead of a whirring hard drive, it has a solid-state flash-card-type drive. It holds just 4 gigabytes on my model, much of it taken up by the installed software; you can add a flash card to supply more storage. Battery time is reasonable, a couple hours, nothing special. The power adapter is like a cell phone’s, small, light and easy to bring along.

The electronics of this gadget are low-end to save money. But today’s low-end is pretty good. And the pieces are well-integrated. The random access memory is 512 megabytes, enough for most workaday purposes using the installed software. I wanted a little more running room. Although on some eee models the RAM cannot be easily upgraded, I had no trouble installing a 2-gigabyte chip. The machine recognizes only 1 gigabyte of that, alas. From help sites I learned that you can update the kernel to get the machine to recognize the full 2 gigabytes, but the procedure sounds complicated and a little dangerous. You can’t just click on a link and download a patch. There are a lot of stupefying command codes that must be chanted in the proper order. Still, I might try it after learning a bit more about Linux. There’s also a way to install Windows XP on the machine, but I don’t see a need for that.

The XO, aimed at kids in developing countries (”One Laptop Per Child”), is the other major recent solution to the problem of producing a cheap but robust mini. Others are on the horizon, happily. Competition in this niche is long overdue. Until now the smallest laptops with any robust and general capacity (as opposed to, say, AlphaSmart’s minimalist alternatives) have been among the most expensive. No doubt we’ll soon see even better solutions from Asus and other companies.

I’ve tweaked the system a bit since getting my eee. But it’s set up so that it can be used out of the box by a person who would dread to redo a single default. (You might want to fine-tune at least the touchpad settings, though.) The home screen features several tabs taking you to pages for “work,” “play,” “learning,” etc., and each of these pages houses several large icons taking you to the software programs. If you can click on a power button, click on a tab, and click on an icon, you’re good to go. Easy, easy, easy.