The Most Hated Company In the PC Industry

Earthweb ^ | 1/4/2008 | Mike Elgan

[discostu]

Mini-laptops as a concept just plain do not excite me. Maybe it’s because I’m 38 and the eyes don’t work so good anymore, but when I’m told 7” screen I think unusable over the long haul.

[goldstategop]

ASUS rewrote the rules for a portable notebook at a mass market price. The eeePC won't win any power user awards but it gets the job done with a solid Linux operating system on board and it looks cool. A desktop version is coming out this year. No more Windows Vista bloat.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[twntaipan]

If you are going to run XP and/or Office, you need to get the 8GB version of this to handle the M$ bloatware. The smaller versions won’t work.

Also, beware of putting older versions of M$ Office on anything...apparently M$ just pushed an update that breaks compatability of .doc files from older versions of Office.

[goldstategop]

Yes - you can load Windows XP on it. But the default OS is so nice and the custom interface is so intuitive people will probably keep the ASUS branded Xandros version. No more blue screen of death.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Tarpon]

Asus, disruptor set to stun. Asus doesn’t play by the rules, they see the whole world collapsing to computing appliances running free software and they plan on building them. That’s why they keep Intel close.

Once the price point is set, it can’t be changed upwards, only down. ASUS, it’s the purple people eater of chips run by Moore’s law, the chip consumes everything.

[txzman]

I’m with you. Have tried them all, will only buy ASUS anymore.

[Brett66]

This reminds me of the old Timex Sinclair:

About the same size too.

[dennisw]

Valid take!

[billmor]

Never had a problem with Asus motherboards...solid as a rock....

So they built a better mousetrap..this is wrong ?...as for the companies that hate them? well, rats never did like mousetraps....

[hiredhand]

Whenever Microslut hates something, I think of it just the same as when the leftists hate something... meaning that it's almost probably a GOOD thing! :-)

I looked at the specs on the unit. It looks like it might be a decent little unit! My daughter has been in the market for something like this, and maybe she'll pick one up. If she does, I'll be sure and give a detailed report of what we think about it.

[Tarpon]

Me too, ASUS builds good stuff at a great price. Their MBs are tops.

[Puntagorda]

Actually, Windows runs great on the least expensive version of the Asus PC.

Find a video showing how quick Windows can be on the Asus at http://youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gHRWXqguw

[Kieri]

Mini-laptops as a concept just plain do not excite me. Maybe it’s because I’m 38 and the eyes don’t work so good anymore, but when I’m told 7” screen I think unusable over the long haul.

It would depend on how you would use it.

My husband has had several PDA's. He loves them because of their fast on/off, they'll run Power Point and their tiny size. We've been looking at the Eee for a couple of months, and see it as an "inbetween" machine for a PDA and full laptop.

He's maxed out the capabilities of his PDA. New memory cards can help only so much.

[billmor]

Excellent points.....Microsoft also broke my Windows 98 when i tried out a demo version of their XP...Learned never to use a demo of anything from Microsoft because of it’s habit of crippling software...

Just where are all the trial lawyers to take this perfectly obvious tort case to court?....oh excuse me...just remembered there is no real way to define a tort...so if i get mugged and lose $100 the perp goes to jail but if Microsoft mugs me out of my $189 operating system, that’s ok because that’s ‘business’...

[allmendream]

Unfortunately a lot of trade magazines do exactly that. You advertise in their mag, they give you promotions and puff piece ‘reviews’ of your products. It is incestuous. The Knife magazines got so blatant about it that Cold Steel (Ventura CA) REFUSES to advertise in knife mags, and lets the chips fall where they may in ‘reviews’ (they make the best knifes in the nation, and therefore the world).

[Cymbaline]

Wouldn’t surprise me if Microsoft bought Asustek soon.

[MarkL]

At this moment, I’m surrounded by systems with ASUS motherboards in them...

This one, and 4 others in this room. Plus another 4 systems in another room of the house, but those have been retired. When I get a chance, I may try putting linux on one, just to see how it works (3 of the 4 have 128MB of RAM, and were used for Win98 and Win2K Pro testing, while the 4th has 768MB of RAM, and was used for a server - All 4 are AMD K5/2 500MHz).

Mark

[LiveFree99]

Good. I’m tired of listening to hard drives constantly grinding away.

[goldstategop]

The eeePC has a solid state drive. That's why its so cheap. The storage space is limited but it doesn't matter. Portable flash or USB drives can be had cheaply these days.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Leisler]

I tried to use various linux, and I like what I could use. But I could never get/figure out the tweaks you had to do to get wifi, or a printer going. I tried the forums but spent so much time saving a buck that I could of worked at a gas station and just bought Vista.