The PC is the white box (the black one behind it is a wireless printer server)
We had an old Dell PC in the cellar which we used when some piece of equipment insisted on having a firmware update under Windows. However it was quite slow, and having a, ahem, not exactly legal copy of Win XP on it, it wasn’t able to update to use the latest Windows service packs. Last weekend I spotted an Asus Eee Box B202 with a 160 GB disk drive, 1 GB memory and built in high speed WLAN for 269 Euro in a department store in town – I decided on impulse to buy it and replace the Dell.
It came with Windows XP pre-installed, and I added Ubuntu 8.10 (a version of Linux, an easy-to-follow installation guide is here) to make it a dual-boot machine. I am impressed. It is about the size of a paperback book – considerably smaller than my Mac mini. It doesn’t have a built-in DVD drive, but an external one was only 59 Euro. And unless you want to play modern games on it, it is fine for surfing the internet and updating firmware. It comes with a kit to attach it to the back of a modern flat screen, so it could be completely out of sight, if I wanted. I imagine it would be a fully acceptable PC for most people. It would also make a great media server, if you need more than 160 GB, you can add more external disks – it has 4 USB 2.0 ports. The old rule, that held for most of the last 25 years, that a decent state-of-the-art PC always costs about $5000 seems to have been completely smashed by the new wave of “nettops” as these small devices are known.
The only slight problem I have with it, is that Linux comes with hopeless support for wireless LAN, so for now, I am accessing the internet via a D-Link DWL G730 AP. This is a very small wireless client. which you can pick up used on E-Bay for a handful of Euro, and which tricks the computer into thinking it is connected to a wired network connection instead of via wireless LAN. I have acquired several here – we also connect the satellite recorder to the network via a G730, to upload recordings to burn them to DVD.
Update (2009-02-09):
I have in the mean time found there is a special version of Ubuntu for the EeePC, EasyPeasy, which I have downloaded and installed. The wireless LAN worked fine. It has a rather unusual desktop, which makes it look a bit like an oversized Palm Pilot, but I also found some instructions on setting it back to the regular Ubuntu desktop.
Incidently, easy peasy is short for “easy peasy, lemon squeezy”, which is what you can say, if you think something is really, really easy! It’s one of those things kids say a lot – it’s not often used in business meetings.
