viernes, 19 de julio de 2013

A Museum Item: the Asus Eee PC 901

How nostalgic!  Today I powered on my wife's Asus Eee PC 901.  That is a tiny 8.9 inch netbook that came with 1Gb RAM, 20Gb SSD, and Linux pre-installed.  My wife kept it at her mother's house, but brought it back two weeks ago.

This thingie is especial for me because I myself was introduced to Linux by an Asus Eee PC.  It was the Eee PC 900 that I bought in Amazon in 2009.  After heavy use, it collapsed. Both machines came with a modified version of Xandros. 

However, my wife's netbook sat on a computer store for quite a long time before I purchased it in 2010.  They wanted to sell it for a price that made no sense: $635!  Obviously, they could not sell it and had to let it go for half the price ($317).  As I had paid around $300 for my own netbook, the price cut made sense and I bought it for my wife.

As I played with the netbook today, I discovered that some of the keyboard keys are not working... maybe because my little nephew and niece have been playing with the poor computer.  Other than that, the machine is working perfectly.  Even its voice command control works.
The default desktop of the Asus Eee PC 901
Xandros file manager running on KDE 3.4.2
The Learn tab.  MeBook actually reads books!
Oldie Firefox 3.0.4
It seems that I can still get some updates, even after Xandros stopped releases in 2006.


My wife should get a MS Surface tablet.  That way, she can later start a computer museum with the Asus netbook and her Windows-Vista-powered laptop :P

3 comentarios:

  1. Don't forget my Japanese Toshiba Dynabook. Hey, it's an A9 model with just 256 Mb of RAM. You can't beat that! It's still alive because it now runs Mepis 8 in Japanese although it still has its Japanese Windows XP.

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  2. That one is truly a collector's pick!

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  3. I just saw this story today. I have managed to install Firefox 17.0 on the Eee PC 901 & 701SD..without breaking anything. 8-)

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