Those of you who follow my Twitter feed will have noticed occasional pained tweets from me about my trials and tribulations on finding an Asus Eee PC.

Helpfully, Adam Bowie was able to point me in the direction of Eee User’s stock availability forum, and, on coming home, I was able to discover that if I jumped in the car now, I could pick one up at PC World in Staples Corner, whereupon I did, listening to the podcast from Iain Lee’s Virgin Radio show as I did.

What an astounding machine. I’ve got the black one (the one in the picture above, though it’s not mine) and it’s stunningly well put together.

It contains just 512M of memory. The hard-drive is flash-based, and is just 4G large. It uses a form of Linux - actually, a commercial form, from what I can tell. All of which might fill you with foreboding.

But turning it on, it just works (and takes 15 seconds to boot from cold). Going to the BBC iPlayer website (which needs Flash), it just works. Using it to write this blog entry, it just works. It’s astoundingly good. It actually feels expensive, too - yet it was £219.

The unit’s tiny; the keyboard is tiddly and a trifle hard to get on with, and the build quality isn’t great (though this one appears to have a halfway decent trackpad, unlike the one that Stephen Fry got his hands on. But it’s a splendid machine.

After a quick update to the internal software (which hardy souls can replace with anything from Windows XP to Ubuntu), the version of Skype does full video chat, thanks to the internal webcam.

The Eee User wiki is full of handy hints and tips to get this thing working just the way you want it. A quick upgrade of Pidgin later to get it working correctly with my new james@cridland.net GoogleTalk/XMPP address, and all is well there, too. I’ve also contributed some information there, as I discovered how to control my Mac Mini from it using VNC (the program’s installed but hidden from sight); and how to connect to a remote drive (so I can edit my websites using it). This is community help at its best; and perhaps shows Linux’s coming of age as a consumer desktop.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: the title of this posting is how you pronounce Asus. I always thought it was ‘AY-suss’, but then, what do I know?

Photo: Steve Keys. Used under licence.