Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

So it’s been three weeks since I got my Eee PC. Is the honeymoon over? Nope!

I’ve spent the past three weeks carrying (and using) the Eee almost everywhere: taking it to work, having it in the car (in case I’m somewhere with free WiFi), etc. Even now I’m kicking back on the couch watching “CSI” and using it to write this. I’ve pored over the wiki at eeeuser.com, read and posted in the forums (the community there is awesome), and spent time customizing and tweaking the Asus-installed Xandros Linux to my liking. Thus far I’ve:

• upgraded to 1gb of RAM: it took me longer to order the 1gb DDR chip than it did to actually install it (see here for a video of just how easy it is).
• customized the interface: using tools like Theeemer, Tweakeee, and EMEditor, I’ve changed the default look-and-feel to something a little slicker looking (see the screen capture at the top of this post).
• installed more applications: I’ve got TrueCrypt so I can access the encrypted volume on my thumb drive, JungleDisk to get to my files backed up with Amazon’s S3 service, and Maelstrom for a little entertainment.
• configured it for work purposes: using the PPTP Client I can VPN into the corporate network and then login to my servers with rdesktop or run applications through Citrix.
• gotten pretty good at accurately typing on the keyboard
• played around with eeecontrol: this utility lets you increase the front-side bus speed (and thus get the CPU back to its normal 900MHz speed instead of the Asus-underclocked 630MhZ). I really haven’t had a problem with the Eee’s performance so I’ve left it alone for now. I still run eeecontrol in the tray, though, so I can watch the fan speed and temp.

It wasn’t all smooth, though. I had a real problem initially getting onto my wireless home network. It turned out that the default wireless driver/script doesn’t like spaces in the WPA key. Once I removed the spaces, the Eee connected just fine (and then I had to fix the WPA key on every other wireless device on the network). After that, I still had problems connecting to the wireless at work (which also uses WPA). Switching to the madwifi driver seemed to finally help in that regard (though I still get the dreading “Pending” status now and then).

The other difficulty was getting wireless printing to my Epson AcuLaser CX11NF working. The test page would “print” according to the Eee, but nothing would happen on the printer. It took some research, but I finally got it working (see my thread on the eeeuser forum for details).

My other minor nit is with the screen size. The 800×480 resolution means sometimes having to drag windows around with the Alt-left click trick in order to see portions that won’t fit on the screen. This also means that web sites that are designed for larger resolutions (like my daughter’s WebKinz site which is all Flash) involve a lot of dragging back and forth.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my Eee. Asus has come pretty close to a hitting a home run with the cost, form factor and out-of-the-box usability. The new 900 model adds the 9″ screen with a slightly larger footprint but at the cost of a slightly larger price tag, so the original 701 series still seems like the better deal that hits the sweet spot.

(more photos of my Eee are posted here)