AppAholic TechRant

As some of you know, the Asus EeePC 701 was reviewed a few months back by TechRant’s own Linux Geek.  Now you may think that all Netbooks are practically the same, but they are very different.  Since the OLPC program was launched and the EeePC released to children in developing countries (via the Give 1 Get One Program), several manufacturers have tried to grab their share of the market by releasing notebooks in various sizes and colours. 

Though similar in size ranging from 7″ models to 10.2″, they have different hardware specs (though a majority are similar).  The Samsung NC10 runs on the newly developed Intel atom architecture boasting a clock speed of 1.6GHz of Hyper-threading goodness.  The EeePC 701 has a Celeron M 353 under its hood clocking at 0.9GHz. 

Memory wise, the NC10 has a 1GB of RAM as standard whereas the EeePC has only half of that.  Both netbooks come with XP preinstalled (Though a linux version is available for the EeePC, but to make things fair, I will compare the XP versions).  Having only half a gig of RAM may make the netbook rather sluggish at running multiple applications though luckily RAM is user upgradable on both netbooks.

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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). (more…)