“Do you use that as your main work computer?” asked a slightly quizzical Erik Huggers, looking at my little Asus Eee PC.

When I’m over in the BBC’s Media Village, I have discovered something called the FM&T HQ Hot-Desk Area, which consists of four desks with keyboard, monitor, a network cable, and a few extra plug points (actually, no extra plug points, but let’s not spoil it). This means that I can bring a laptop over, log in to Reith, the internal BBC network, and get on with some work.

Except I rarely carry my BBC-issue “ultra-light” HP around. I’ll not bore you with the specifics, other than to mention that the BBC appears to have virtually no business wifi, that I have to carry the power adaptor around which is almost as heavy as the laptop, that the desktop is crippled to not connect to open wifi connections with anything like ease, that it appears to have little power management, and, finally, it uses… Windows. Which I’m surprising myself by beginning to actively hate as an OS.

So instead, I carry my little Asus Eee PC around with me. Which, you’ll recall, has virtually no storage space whatsoever – mine’s the 4G model, which, after an install of Ubuntu Hardy Heron, has about half that spare. Not only that, but it can’t connect to Reith at all (not being a BBC machine), so the documents on my fileshare are unavailable. No wonder Erik gave me a quizzical look. How could I do any work on the thing?

Well, part of it is that I’ve discovered quite a few “dirty” internet connections (ADSL lines connected directly out, via wifi, to the internet), and partly it’s because I run my life in the cloud, with most of what I need either on a 4G USB stick that I carry around with me, or on my own Amazon S3 storage through JungleDisk. (Indeed, so far, this entry is the abortive beginning of that post).

I’m a big fan of my little Asus Eee. I found Xandros, the Linux distro that the unit shipped with, quite confusing: I’ve only really been using Linux for a year or so now, and I’ve only just got to grips with Ubuntu, so I popped Ubuntu 8.04 onto the device, and got the thing working quite well. So well, indeed, that I’ve written a wiki page on how to do it (which many others, gratifyingly, have added to).

The one thing I did notice was that Ubuntu used a lot more battery power than Xandros. The Eee’s battery power isn’t particularly magical, so to have even less battery power was disappointing. I guessed it might be something with processor scaling, that magical bit of running a computer where your machine thinks “ah, I’m having it easy now, I’ll stop running the processor quite so fast”.

I was right; Ubuntu as it’s initially configured on the Asus doesn’t enable processor scaling at all. Yet the little Intel processor inside my Asus Eee does cope with it quite happily: it’s just that the OS doesn’t allow it.

So, after a few hours’ research, I’m happy to mention that I’m now running a better, processor-scaled, version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the Asus Eee. Naturally, this information is now on the wiki, and it’s a quick, less-than-ten-step process. The machine’s running less hot, and the battery should last significantly longer. And, interestingly, the top speed has changed from 650MHz to 900MHz – that’s quite a potential speed increase.

What else of the Asus Eee? Well, the screen on my 710 is a little too small; the just-released 900 fixes that, but at a massive price premium. The keyboard appears to have the numbers in the wrong place, which gets a bit of getting used to (though the size is just fine). However, the machine’s really rather well-built: solid and reassuring-feeling, rather than cheap and tacky. I was lucky enough to buy the black version instead of the “looks cute but shows the dirt” white version so it looks halfway decent; and it has many more connections than, say, the Apple MacBook Air.

And unlike one of my colleagues, who uses his MacBook Air to take notes using nothing more than TextEditor (ha!), I’ve quite a sensible note-taking system, thanks to the wonderful world of Tiddlywiki: a perfectly usable and brilliant offline note-taking system. Just power up Firefox, open the local Tiddlywiki on my system, and there are all my notes, all interlinked, with full backup files and (if I set it up) online backup. It’s really quite excellent.

Anyway, after showing him, Erik’s impressed at the Asus. So should you be. At about £220, it’s really not the worst machine you could ever buy.

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