Meet George. My Asus Eee PC 701. Yes, I have a weird tendency of naming inanimate objects. See, George came with XP but I decided to be a little hardcore and go the Linux way, yo.

Bad idea.

I tried the Asus Eee PC custom version of Xubuntu. And though it worked fine for the most part, it had some weird quirks. Like insisting my battery was broken and being picky about what Wi-Fi networks it would connect to. Fairly annoying, and though I knew those little bugs would be fixable if I could locate an Internet connection for me to download instructions from, I didn’t have the time. No.

Though I love the idea of Linux, and Xubuntu is, in many ways, a lovely OS to use, I can’t be grokking the thing everytime. I want something that works out of the box, and if it doesn’t, I want to be able to know how to fix it.

Well, I grew up with Windows. From 3.1, to 95 to 98 to XP to 2000, NT Server Win2k Server and now Vista, I’ve grown wise to the way of the Windoze. Yes, my Open Source cred is going to go down 1,000 points but using Windows has gotten just so intuitive that Linux’s many hoops just isn’t attractive.

So I reinstalled XP from Asus’s handy image restore disk. Then I took a ginsu knife to it. I removed all the apps I could get away with – MS Works, Adobe PDF Reader, SQL, Windows Live (except for Writer and Messenger), threw out the Help files, extraneous .TXT files and compressed the friggin’ drive. Not to mention a random few bits here and there

I now have 2GB free on my Asus Eee PC on a 4GB hard disk. Go me. I also run the Portable Apps Suite (light) from my Kingston 4GB drive so I can bring my documents everywhere. It even has a Portable version of The Gimp so you can do without Photoshop.

For a more comprehensive guide on cutting out the fat from XP, try reading Bold Fortune’s guide here. Be warned, though, it’s not an easy slog but if you’ve got the time and tenacity to go through all the threads, you’ll get quite the education on XP’s innards.

And if you make a PDF version and email it to me, I might possibly agree to have your babies.

So, George is now lean and mean. He’s just missing one thing – a sizable SD card for me to store data on. That will have to wait till the next PC Fair, and hopefully 16GB SD cards can be had without me needing to sell off a spare kidney.

So the HP 2133 Mini-Note finally made its official launch on the shores of Singapore, enabling me to finally get my grubby hands on the journo discount unit i’d ordered almost three weeks ago.

Oh. Yeah. Baby. Read on for the rest of the unboxing picture set.

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Some months after i’d made the move to Singapore, the local Nokia honchos decided to pass me one of their (then) new N800 internet tablets as part of their ongoing journalist seeding programs. At the time, I was quite literally chuffed, not just because the N800 hadn’t even been officially made available on the local market at the time, but also because I instantly had grand dreams of myself surfing the WWW anywhere I went that had WiFi, listening to music and watching videos, making Skype calls when away from the desk; basically just about everything the marketing material said the N800 could help you do.

That was before I discovered that the built-in processor on the N800 wasn’t as robust as i’d hoped, requiring videos to be re-encoded to a resolution of 400×240 and a frame rate of about 18-20 before things appeared to run smooth. Video at 800×480 was a joke, unless if you prefer a slideshow.

This was also before I discovered that the Wireless@SG initiative in Singapore to provide easily accessible WiFi on most parts of the island was mainly a pile of steaming horse manure. Short of popping over to places like Starbucks where WiFi was free, the Wireless@SG hotspots I did come across were utterly congested. Even getting on dial-up would have been faster. Read the rest of this entry »