Earlier this year, I had the fortune to obtain an Asus EeePC 701 and, after initially getting it as a ‘useful school machine’ it gradually became apparent that it was considerably more powerful than I had originally expected it to be.

Initially I was surprised when I installed EeeBuntu on it (a variation of Ubuntu Linux which includes all necessary drivers and some Eee friendly modifications) that it ran compiz even more smoothly than my desktop does (although this could be attributed to the very low resolution, 800×480, at which the graphics are running — still impressive though).

It was only recently when I realised quite how useful this machine is when (in eeebuntu) I installed VirtualBox and installed (an nLited) Windows XP, expecting it to run, albeit rather sluggishly.

As expected, it installed and ran. Not as expected however, it ran smoothly and without a hitch (As you may have guessed from the screenshot, which is in eeebuntu, I am using this VM to run Windows Live Writer to write this post). Admittedly, I had disabled (during the nLite process) a lot of the (unnecessary) features which could slow the machine down overly. I still find it very impressive that Windows will run smoothly in a virtual machine at all.

This machine never ceases to amaze me, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone, even cheapskates like me (and at under £200, a bargain).