Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 16 years old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

I’ve been following Asus’ Eee PC since it was first released late last year and was finally no longer able to resist its siren call. I purchased the Galaxy Black 4G Surf, deciding that the extra $50 over the 2G Surf was worth a) double the storage capacity (4gb vs. 2gb), b) user-upgradeable RAM, and c) a slightly faster CPU (you can see the model comparisons here).

My initial observations:

• It’s tiny! The photo to the left shows the Eee on top of my Sony VAIO SZ340P. Of course, with the smaller size comes a few compromises: the 7″ screen doesn’t give you a lot of real estate and the keyboard is a bit cramped for my big hands. When at home, these problems could be solved by connecting an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but that would diminish the coolness factor of how small it is.
• It’s quiet. No moving parts except for the fan (and I haven’t heard that kick on yet).
• It’s fast (but not too fast). The 4G Surf uses a 900 MHz Intel Celeron M processor (but it’s underclocked to just 630 MHz!) and has 512mb of RAM. The system boots the customized Xandros Linux distro from the solid-state hard drive in just a few seconds and seems snappy enough even with a few applications open.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, but I’ll post my observations here as I learn more about it. On my To Do List is “over”-clocking the CPU back to 900MHz, possibly upgrading to 1gb or 2gb of RAM, and possibly attempting to install Windows XP. Check back later for more!