Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388238/asus-eee-pc-netbook-laptop-line-linux-ipad-pro

by Tomte • 4 years ago

238 200 4 years ago

anthk• 4 years ago

I still use OpenBSD x86 on an Atom netbook.

implements• 4 years ago

Me too. OpenBSD worked flawlessly (built-in WiFi, and suspend) on the Eee PC MK90H. (Changing the CMOS battery requires a pretty deep tear down, though)

pestatije• 4 years ago

They're all chromebooks now

hedora• 4 years ago

All but this one (as in one left in stock):

https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Cloudbook-AO1-431-C8G8-Celeron-P...

RajT882• 4 years ago

Nah. I have an HP Spectre x360 that fills the niche in terms of thickness. Small and light enough to stick it in a bag and go, and actually not all that underpowered.

ssorc• 4 years ago

The Dell Inspiron 1100 comes very close.

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

I have one. Best kitchen computer ever. About 8 yrs worth of use for 99 bux. Battery is bad now but it's too expensive to replace. It might be time to replace.

bluedino• 4 years ago

Couch computer for me.

mrweasel• 4 years ago

This, and as the other comment says: Couch computing.

They weren't great computers as such, but for quickly looking up things or surfing the web they where fine. My father in-law kept one on the coffee table until it the battery just died after ten years or so. It was just a quick way to look up stuff or check emails.

There aren't really any good replacement. Personally I want a keyboard, so out goes the iPad and phone, Neither are device I truly enjoy using anyway. Even the modern ultra books are to big and devices like the GPD are too expensive.

Technically it seems like it would be way more feasible to build some like the EEE form factor today, but the market might be to small.

kramerger2• 4 years ago

My EEE was probably my best laptop purchase ever.

Dual core atom with 2GB memory, became my BYOD dev machine at work (with external keyboard and monitor, of course). Handled dev tasks in Ubuntu like a charm, weighted almost nothing.

jorgemendes• 4 years ago

I still have my EEE Pc 701 from 2007. Still works well with 2GB of RAM, Void Linux+DWM and an extended filesystem in the SD Card. Good for experimenting and for note taking with Emacs+org roam or Zim. Still good for reading wikipedia or stack overflow articles with netsurf or seamonkey(sites with JavaScript). Remember searching open or crackable wifi networks with the little fellow in the palm of my hand. I have another with NetBSD, works well too.

emptysongglass• 4 years ago

In some ways that era of netbooks felt like the glory days of creative computing devices and OSes. Intel created this really lovely UI on top of Linux called Moblin. My mom ran Jolicloud, which was built around webapps. A bunch of netbooks were coming out with their own Linux flavors to the mass market and webOS was right around the corner.

I'm going to say this with a straight face: if only more people would have had better taste I think we might have inherited a beautiful future of free and open computing.

The Eee PC 701 was cheap and came with Linux OOTB. Now we have to spend thousands of dollars for underpowered garage projects like the MNT Reform or else pay about what we did for the 701 for underpowered laptops that will never get their bugs fixed like the Pinebook.

alisonatwork• 4 years ago

I think the most accessible small form factor Linux box right now is the Steam Deck. You're paying a bit more for game controller hardware if you just want to use it as a workstation, but it is just Linux under the hood and looks to be a pretty neat cyberdeck-like device.

unionpivo• 4 years ago

I have high hopes for Framework.

They seem to be nailing it for now. Could see them experimenting with other form factors.

Also if they succeed other people will try to copy them.

kramerger2• 4 years ago

Funny how bad the Engadget/Verge crowd are at technology that is not 100% mainstream?

The top comments are much more insightful.

glonq• 4 years ago

I have a slow-ass Eee PC rusting in a closet somewhere. What can I do with it? I already have a much-less-slow Surface Go as the family/kitchen computer.

bitwize• 4 years ago

I still have my MSI Wind. Great little machine. It runs Emacs and a compiler comfortably, so it's still useful. I prototyped a game on it over a series of subway trips to/from work.

One time a pretty girl at a bar saw it with its little retro Window Maker desktop, and told me I should buy Apple products because they're "more digital".

I guess netbooks are considered "retro" computing devices now, huh. Damn, I'm old.

doubled112• 4 years ago

I recently recycled an MSI Wind U100. Battery was shot, hinges gave up years ago, keyboard was in pretty rough shape. Still booted though off a budget (at the time) 40GB Intel SSD that made it feel fast.

Still chuckle that they offered the overclocking option as if it mattered on that Atom N270 CPU.

Dragged it everywhere for a bit. It was the first laptop shaped device I could afford new as a teenager. I refuse to believe it's retro.

_carbyau_• 4 years ago

"More digital", love it.

Ten years ago I had a conversation with an 18 year old who's father ran a phone shop. Of course she always had the latest and greatest phone. And she mentioned her phone was "elegant".

I asked for a definition of "elegant" and without skipping a beat she returned: "Shiny. Electronic. Made in the last 6 months."

And so I learned elegance had a timespan.

jamesgeck03• 4 years ago

My MSI Wind seemed like the perfect candidate for Alpine Linux. Alas, the GPU is so old that hardly anything but a terminal starts without crashing in Wayland.

themadturk• 4 years ago

I borrowed a friend's Acer Aspire for quite a while when I was unemployed during the Great Recession. My 1st gen MacBook Air had a bad battery, but the Aspire was a lifesaver and not a bad little machine at all.

AzureShill420• 4 years ago

The eeePC 901 was what got me into Linux, and by extension basically my whole career in IT. Fabulous little device which changed my perception of computers from "gaming plus garbage MS Office software" to a truly general purpose, infinitely customizable tool.

razzimatazz• 4 years ago

I'm glad my asuss eee is gone now, but in 2011 it was a fabulous travel aid for exploring italy - keeping us out of icky internet cafes and keeping us entertained on the long slow (railpass compliant) rail journeys.

Netbooks became of course the small and underpowered laptop that many rely upon today. They also perhaps provided some of the foundation for iPad's success - giving Apple a clear starting point from which to market a much nicer portable internet device.

timr• 4 years ago

Me too. I bought one for a trip around Europe in 2010 or so. I wanted something:

* small and light

* cheap enough that I wouldn't cry if it was lost or stolen in sketchy hostels

* capable of using the web and checking email

Since there wasn't an iPad back then, and the iPhone was an expensive theft target, the eee was a perfect fit. The fact that it ran Linux was also cool. A year or two later I bought a MacBook Air and used that for the same purpose (more expensive, but I wasn't staying in hostels much at that point).

I'm not sure if the author was a child at the time or what, but these obviously fit a niche.

Sunspark2• 4 years ago

The Eee PC 701 was amazing. It was really good for students who needed something small and light that they could take to the library, etc. The alternative back then was a heavy power-hungry full-size laptop. This is before all the stuff we take for granted today like tablets, etc.

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook.

After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size. Even Linus Torvalds owned one.

Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well, but they're locked down and all-in on Google compared to the old netbooks which let you run anything, so they're not an ideal replacement.

I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask? It's a tough call because the competition for netbooks is actually smartphones. A student writing a paper, all they need is just a bluetooth keyboard and something to lean their 6.7" phone or tablet against.

maicro• 4 years ago

I'll just throw this out there - GalliumOS works fairly well to convert a Chromebook into a full-fat Linux laptop. I've only installed it on one, but the process wasn't too hard. The end result is kinda hacky, and from what I recall there's not much development being done on Gallium of late, but it's still an option.

TheCycoONE• 4 years ago

GalliumOS works for the x86 chromebooks. For a handful of arm chromebooks archlinuxarm works reasonably well.

I bought a Samsung Chromebook Plus (1st gen) before covid when I was taking the train every day. I find it to be a great carry with me device for note taking, web browsing, coding, and light gaming when combined with a tiling window manager. It certainly feels like the netbook promise of the late 2000s.

I have to caution that for that particular device the stock kernel in archlinuxarm no longer boots because there are limits on the boot partition size. The workaround I'm aware of is to build out your disk on an sd card / usb stick on another computer, cross compiling the kernel with a reduced set of drivers, and installing it using binfmt-qemu-static/chroot.

bluesquared• 4 years ago

Still pretty hacky on my Acer Chromebook Flip C302, could never get audio working quite right. I'd agree and say GalliumOS on most Chromebooks is like mid-2000s desktop Linux hacky.

RosanaAnaDana4• 4 years ago

pretty sure i bricked my eee doing a bios update so i could put linux on it.

dwringer• 4 years ago

Mine almost bricked itself due to the accumulation of driver and Windows updates, so I installed Linux to save it. But by then it was slow, noisy, and full of moving parts compared to alternatives and I never really used it again.

0xcde4c3db• 4 years ago

Chromebooks have now taken over the small and light segment replacing tablets as well

Maybe, maybe not. ICYMI, Google "pre-announced" an Android tablet for 2023 [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1524462561143537664

Nursie4• 4 years ago

Nah, the 901 was where it was at! Atom chip, more usable screen size, 4GB system drive that was reasonably snappy. I used that thing for years, even ran OSX snow-leopard on it for a while.

joecool1029• 4 years ago

I still have one in operating condition. It was the first laptop I owned with SSD's (dual SSD setup, 4GB SLC and 16GB MLC SSD. Also had SD card for expansion. The SSD's were unique in that they slotted into slots that were physically mini-pcie slots, but wired electrically with SATA, PATA, and USB.

Having the SSD setup in 2007 was ahead of its time and really made the laptop feel faster than it was. Also being the size of a paperback book meant it traveled well.

After the 901, Asus was sorta forced to kill the line as Windows sold more units than Linux and was a pig on drive usage (Microsoft stopped licensing XP as it was long in the tooth by this point). Rather than throw the dual SSD setup in, they moved to slow 250GB HDD's and sized up the keyboard/screeen to 10". Basically became a cheap and slow and not that much smaller laptop.

Oh, another random thing the 901 had was lots of easy to access internal USB headers to wire devices to internally like additional drives and touch panel. This was something else removed in later models cost cutting.

jrockway• 4 years ago

I had both of those. I think I got the most use out of the 701. I took that thing everywhere and used it as my primary laptop. You can probably find pictures of me using it to give conference talks, sitting around at hackathons coding (with a HHKB attached), etc. I used Debian, and even had working WiFi.

The 901 I bought later since it seemed like more specs would be better, it was big and cheap feeling. I do remember getting a WiMax stick for it and reading RSS feeds in Google Reader on my commute. That was so novel at the time!

rkangel• 4 years ago

I've just dug through my email to be sure - I also had a 901! The 20GB version version, running Linux.

I was just about not a student at this point but still doing a lot of Theatre touring. The EEE PC was great for what I needed which was to be portable enough to carry around all the time in Edinburgh, check my email in bars, and even be solid enough to run the sound effects for a show!

ryukafalz• 4 years ago

As for why manufacturers don’t make netbooks… it’s a fair point if you’re only looking at the major PC makers I guess, but overall they actually do! Think GPD Pocket series, One Mix series, (soon) MNT Pocket Reform. It’s a niche, but the hardware exists!

jamesgeck03• 4 years ago

Microsoft makes two netbook adjacent devices! The Surface Go is a netbook with a tablet form factor. And the Surface Laptop SE is an (admittedly slightly large) netbook.

marttt5• 4 years ago

I wonder if this indicates that refurbished netbooks actually would have some aftermarket value, for "niche people" or more capable Linux users at least. Maybe they would run into driver issues, though.

type04• 4 years ago

GPD MicroPC even has a serial port, but nowadays something like a Seeed reTerminal with E10-1 is probably a better buy

strken2• 4 years ago

As a student the 701 was great. It fit in my (large) coat pocket, supported up to 2gb of ram, ran Xubuntu fine, was sturdier than my main laptop, had amazing battery life, and a real keyboard. It fit in that annoying niche between my tiny consumption-oriented phone and big work-oriented laptop, when I needed a full Linux environment for something but didn't mind if the command took a little while longer to type or run.

Later netbooks were all missing something. They were either expensive, had exclusively soldered parts, were thinner and less sturdy (but not smaller), had driver problems on Linux, or had terrible battery life.

hashtag-til• 4 years ago

wow. So many memories. I had one that I used as spare laptop, and compared to laptops at that time, the battery life was amazing. The weight made it very discreet (important for me living in a crap place in which somebody could kill you to take your laptop) and portable.

Used to run Ubuntu on it - a little struggle to get wifi working, but apart from that it was great.

pnutjam2• 4 years ago

Yeah, soldered parts; but most manufacturers sell a windows pc with emmc storage that is pretty cheap. I have an older HP version with 2GB of Ram and 16GB eeMC storage. It fits in the tablet pocket of my backpack, is super light, long battery life, and runs opensuse like a champ, even with KDE. EDIT: emmc, not eemc.

dirtyv• 4 years ago

If you are actually interested in buying something like that you just described the Pinebook/Pinebook Pro. I've got the Pro and love it

l72• 4 years ago

I bought a Pinebook Pro because I wanted to support the project. However, it has turned into my primary personal laptop. It works great for all my personal development projects (emacs + elixir/javascript/react/python), running my side business (Shopify store), along with book keeping (plain text accounting), and general web surfing.

Suspend works well. Battery life is good enough (not as good as my m1 macbook). Wifi and everything else works fine. The only annoyance is the sound card doesn't get reset correctly after suspend. This required setting up a script to reload the module + a systemd unit to run it when coming back from suspend.

It is cheap enough that I'm not worried about throwing it in my bag or taking it overseas. It also seems to get a lot of attention in public as it has no markings on it at all!

I've thought about expanding the hard drive (as 64G isn't much), but it forces me to push everything to my home server/NAS which is a good thing.

creakingstairs• 4 years ago

I know it will never happen but I'd love for Apple to bring back 12 inch MacBook with the new M1 chip and the newer keyboard. It would be perfect for light note taking/ productivity on the go.

oynqr• 4 years ago

I'm not so sure Apple is stoked on bringing back the Macbook that was regarded as the worst by many.

grecy• 4 years ago

I ran MacOS X on my Dell Mini 9, it was a close to flawless as you could get back then in such a tiny portable. From memory, sleep was the only thing that didn't work 100% correctly - I always just shut it down.

Cockbrand• 4 years ago

Same here, on an Eee PC 901. It was a bit slow compared to a real Mac, but ran surprisingly well, resulting in quite a fun little machine with OS X.

marttt5• 4 years ago

+1 for the Dell Mini 9. In fact, I use it daily for most things, as I got one in mint condition for only a few euros. Tiny Core Linux, framebuffer mode, text-only browsing, Ali G. Rudi's framebuffer tools [1]. I also added a matte screen protector, which is fine against eye strain.

I really don't want to go back to neither a traditional GUI experience, nor, somewhat surprisingly, to a bigger screen. This is a bit odd, but it is much easier to stay focused with a small screen. You'll write more one-liner scripts to help your workflow. A machine the size of an A5 writing pad. It's a nice experience.

The keyboard is also surprisingly tolerable. And, due to being fanless, the machine is spookily quiet, which helps even more with the focusing.

There should be a lot of old netbooks lying around. I imagine they were often used only a few times and then forgotten in that bottom drawer, because, maybe you do need to be somewhat a geek to use one of these in a dedicated manner. I couldn't imagine using my Mini 9 with a traditional GUI, or even a mouse. For terminal-only work, though, it is really great.

So I guess all these old, peanuts-prized machines could be interesting to frugal computing / retrocomputing people, which seems to be a growing niche among younger folks.

1: http://litcave.rudi.ir

notyourwork• 4 years ago

The Asus was perfect during undergraduate, in fact I actually mined bitcoin on it in a class when we first heard of cryptocurrency.

Pretty wild stuff, I miss that bugger. Only downside was the ram soldered to the board preventing upgrade.

themodelplumber2• 4 years ago

You got me thinking...I still run my MSI Wind netbook (RIP Zareason!), and it's worked great with both Haiku and Q4OS recently.

The keyboard is a near-disaster in some ways but after configuring a bunch of workarounds it's reasonably comfortable.

I took it on a trip to Sicily soon after purchasing and have fond memories of using it and my n810 "media center" for that trip. I didn't have WiFi at the guest house where I stayed so I ended up getting my work done from the front of a tiny cafe in Noto, stooped over the tiny screen, but very much geeking out.

The form factor is still really kind of cool when I'm in the mood to play with it, but once anything with cords needs to attach to it, it starts to look kind of overwhelmed IMO.

Still, to this day I'd rather build stuff on it than on my phone. But that probably has a lot to do with things like muscle memory, maybe in addition to the fact that a properly-configured desktop OS (esp. with keyboard workarounds) is just something else when you're ready to work.

marttt5• 4 years ago

"... I still run my MSI Wind netbook ..."

Were the MSI Winds fanless, or did they have a fan? And the hard disk, I assume, wasn't a SSD? I ask because I just noticed kids of our relatives using an abandoned Wind as a toy (to play "work"). They claim it is "broken", but who knows. I sneaked behind their back and tested the keyboard for typing -- it felt really good! A pity to see a potentially useful machine simply lying around like this, especially when my country needs to help out close to 50,000 war refugees from Ukraine. Our CS students refurbish laptops for the refugees -- this one could make an excellent machine for an Ukrainian hacker, or any other user with modest needs.

Another excellent netbook was the Samsung NC10 [1]. Really good keyboard (93% of full size), sturdy build in general, screen hinges reach about 180 degrees, and a "fanless mode", that is, you can adjust the fan speed with a hotkey. Unfortunately, the one I tested suffered from its symptomatic "white screen problem" (described in the Wikipedia article).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_NC10

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

I don't think netbooks will be back. When you look at something like the Raspberry Pi 4, it's way more powerful than the old Eee 701 was and the Pi is a very small form factor. If a manufacturer thinks there is a market for it, they could encapsulate something like that in a keyboard and screen and give it Linux as an open OS. So why won't this happen you ask?

Roughly speaking, that is exactly how netbooks started and then they very quickly switched to Windows.

I don't know if it was consumer pressure or pressure from MS that caused this, but I do think it was Microsoft that pressured producers to switch.

Marazan2• 4 years ago

Combination of MS and Intel.

MS offered a massive discount on windows XP for netbooks as they saw the Linus writing on the wall.

Intel choked of supply for people who wanted to build more fully feature netbooks - thus the constrained specs on things like memory)

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

I used to work at a computer store at the time; mostly doing tech stuff but also sales sometimes when it was busy. We sold a lot of Netbooks, both running Windows and Linux.

"This model runs Windows" was a real selling point for many customers. You have to realize that many people just don't give a flying hoot about their computers, they just want something to access a few websites and such, and Windows is what they were familiar with.

We sold a lot more Windows EEE machines than Linux ones, in spite of being quite a bit more expensive.

Was there also pressure from Microsoft? I don't know; I wouldn't be surprised. But there certainly was a real consumer demand as well.

awiesenhofer• 4 years ago

I wouldn't call it "pressure" - MS just started to give away Windows for free if the device was under certain specs[1]. At that point it became a nobrainer for OEMs to just use Windows if it costs them the same anyway.

[1] up to 11" and 4gb RAM IIRC

pnutjam2• 4 years ago

modern netbook: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-11-6-laptop-intel-celeron-...

nvrspyx• 4 years ago

Now I'm feeling nostalgic. My main laptop in high school was a tiny Eee netbook (don't remember the model) running CrunchBang. I ended up using it as a headless server for a makeshift home lab during my freshman year in college.

grudg3• 4 years ago

I had one as well and loved it. One day someone broke into the flat and it got stolen. I still think about it sometime. It was really a great form factor.

otabdeveloper4• 4 years ago

https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Everyday-use/ASUS-E203...

How is this not a netbook in everything but name?

mkl• 4 years ago

It has an 11.6-inch screen. Netbooks were tiny, more like 7-10".

ant6n• 4 years ago

I had a Dell Mini 10 (actually 1012), and it was a bit larger, so keyboard was actually useable. Plus it had a useful screen resolution (1300s vs 1024 for width).

wirrbel• 4 years ago

I think I have never seen a chromebook in real life.

gtirloni• 4 years ago

It's heavily used at schools these days. Also, a local college has thousands of them here.

Random_Person• 4 years ago

I've got one. I use it only for writing. It's been great for that because it's terrible at everything else. It is essentially a modern-day word processor for me. I can work for hours and hours unplugged and if I need to do a bit of research, I can without having to pull out my distraction machine (phone).

decafninja• 4 years ago

Same. Then again, outside of work I seem to rarely see any laptop in use that isn't a Mac these days. I know that's not representative, but still.

amadeuspagel• 4 years ago

You have a linux container on chromebooks, where you can run anything. Doesn't feel locked down to me.

timw4mail2• 4 years ago

Netbooks are kind of back, though. 11/12" screens, N3000/N4000 series Celeron processors, 32-64GB of storage, sd card slot, and Windows 10.

type04• 4 years ago

The Dell Inspiron Mini 9 was the next really good netbook. After those, Apple introduced the Macbook Air which came in a 11.6" size.

Lenovo S10 could run Hackintosh

jwommack• 4 years ago

Windows updates on older Eee PCs got/gets brutal a few years in. Mostly due to them needing to take up more and more hard drive space.

I remember there was a significant security update a few years back that would just constantly retry on Eee PCs because it needed like 20Gb of storage it would basically never get. Made it essentially unusable.

GekkePrutser• 4 years ago

The EEEPC 701 was not great in terms of maximizing usability for the form factor. The screen bezels were huge as were the speakers beside it. The vertical resolution wasn't even enough to show some control panel dialogs in Windows XP. I had one myself but there were just too many corners cut to take make it work out.

Later models solved these issues and more and were much more bang for the buck. And maximized the usability for the size and price point.

rjzzleep• 4 years ago

For a while I did web backend development on my Eee PC, I used it as a hackintosh and modded a minipci 3g module on it. I actually got used to it for a while until I used o normal laptop again and noticed just how incredibly slow those Atom CPUs were.

emptyparadise• 4 years ago

I just want a really small laptop like those Vaios from back in the day.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

The 8" Vaio was a great little machine. I wish I knew when and why the hacker aesthetic switched from devices that fit in your hand to devices that only barely fit in your car and double as diving boards. I hate this trend. When you think of "a hacker" you think of a person who whips out an Atari Portfolio to commit some kind of mischief on the spot, not some clown with a 16" macbook.

ffhhj• 4 years ago

"The OLPC project was the subject of much discussion. It was praised for pioneering low-cost, low-power laptops and inspiring later variants such as Eee PCs and Chromebooks"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child

83457• 4 years ago

I'll always think of OLPC when the topic of netbooks comes up.

temp12192021• 4 years ago

I remember really wanting one of these back in 2007 or 2008.

kingkawn• 4 years ago

I had one of these, it was great, although the micro-keyboard took some getting used to because I have big hands. My first Gen MacBook Air replaced it eventually. RIP

infofarmer• 4 years ago

Loved my EeePC 1000HE back in the day, ran FreeBSD on it along with many other committers and we were all carefully tweaking the milli-amperage (power drain) to maximize battery life. I used to remember how many mA some kernel modules and daemons consumed.

At some point I donated it to my startup to serve as a datacenter recovery console complete with a 3G USB modem.

On a trip to SF, I saw an Asus Eee Pad at BestBuy (and Android tablet) and couldn’t resist the power of the Eee marquee. It didn’t serve as well or as long as an iPad would, but had a great life and is still alive 11 years later.

p1necone• 4 years ago

I used one of these for uni for a while. The small screen is really not a barrier for just taking notes in class and the portability is so much better than a regular sized laptop (and the size makes it practically indestructible too).

It also makes for a surprisingly adequate dev environment if you get used to switching between virtual desktops for extra screen space.

Using an iPad instead of one of these would have been a total non starter[1]. If I was back at uni nowadays I'd probably just get the smallest laptop I could find with half decent battery life - funnily enough the new M1/M2 macbooks are pretty appealing, but I would love something in an even smaller form factor if possible.

[1] proper hinged lid is much nicer than a keyboard case with a kickstand, I need to be able to compile code and run arbitrary executables.

RosanaAnaDana4• 4 years ago

the sizw was pwrfect for tiny uni desks.

chx• 4 years ago

one mix yoga 2s

few years old yes but still the only 7" non-Atom non-eMMC laptop. There's no other.

RosanaAnaDana4• 4 years ago

I had an eee that I absolutely loved. It could barely run multiple tabs in chrome but it was small enough I could fit it in a satchel. Did my undergrad begining to end with it.

orangepurple• 4 years ago

My takeaway from the article: Microsoft gave ASUS a deal they couldn't refuse. ASUS took the bait and sold the Eee PC with Windows preinstalled but the version of Windows was a little too crappy. Ultimately this sealed their fate as people upgraded to a "real computer," resigning the Eee PC's position to that of a toy. Is this right?

MichaelCollins• 4 years ago

The one I bought came with Linux, but some weird distro I never heard of and I doubt anybody would really want to use. So I install a mainstream distro on it, no big deal, but then the limitations of the very small screen size become apparent when KDE/GNOME fail to fit basic things like settings GUIs onto the screen.

With a tiling window manager it became perfect for me. But I think most general computer users would be utterly alienated with that Linux experience. For the windows experience to also be shitty doubtlessly hurt the product line as well, but I don't think that shitty windows experience was displacing a polished linux experience. I think ASUS was basically between a rock and a hard place.

Animats2• 4 years ago

but then the limitations of the very small screen size become apparent when KDE/GNOME fail to fit basic things like settings GUIs onto the screen.

Yes, hit that problem.

astura• 4 years ago

I couldn't do my timecard on my eee PC due to screen size.

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

I have two EEEPC 700 machines here, one I bought with a Linux on it new, the other I picked up at the tip shop for $5 that had windows XP on it.

Waiting for windows to boot on that thing is a real exercise in patience. The supplied Linux was OK but I'm pretty sure Debian boots on it without issue.

The real reason they became a toy was that people realised the keyboard is just too cramped for regular use. The 11" laptops that followed were a lot more sensible and not a lot more money.

rob74• 4 years ago

I'm surprised that no one seems to have mentioned Unity so far - Ubuntu originally developed it for its "Netbook Edition", then adopted it for the main Ubuntu distro. However it didn't stop the decline of netbooks or lead to the breakthrough of "Linux on the desktop" unfortunately...

asojfdowgh• 4 years ago

Microsoft gave ASUS a deal they couldn't refuse.

and afaik others too, to flood the market with more "practical" options than the XO, so the XO wouldn't take off in other parts of the world

can't have computer classes without having microsoft computer classes, after all. Gotta get em' while they are young.

https://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/past-issues/issue-... https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...

verytrivial• 4 years ago

I recall some site called olpcnews or similar that was run by a pretty brazen shill that posted nothing but fud regarding the project and news of deals and projects from Intel and Microsoft around the Windows offering. Where or not there were fatal flaws in the OLPC model there was NO WAY the incumbents were going to let edu fall to it.

aappleby• 4 years ago

Loved my Eee PC at the time. Just enough computer, cheap, small.

DiJu519• 4 years ago

Asus has had some of the worst naming conventions on their laptop over the years.

Good luck figuring out which Zenbook UX3XX compares to which, with every configuration under the moon available.

JoshTriplett• 4 years ago

The eee PC was also the original netbook used for the "booting Linux in five seconds" presentation at the first Linux Plumbers Conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

That presentation inspired a whole wave of boot optimizations across the industry, that recalibrated the expectations for what "boot fast" meant. If you look at some systems at the time, "boots in 30 seconds" was a selling point.

Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase.

macNchz• 4 years ago

Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second, with the slowest portion of booting any secure system being the user typing a passphrase.

What sort of machines boot in one second? My 12-core Linux desktop with one of the fastest nvme drives on the market sure doesn’t. I’d guess more like 15-20s. I don’t think my wife’s M1 Mac is at all close to 1s either, unless you count waking from sleep.

I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I feel like people simply restart their computers less often than they did 15 years ago, so boot time isn’t the most compelling metric when selling machines these days.

Aeolun• 4 years ago

I don’t really have to reboot my M1 ever (short of updates), so booting is more or less equal to flipping open the screen.

jabbany4• 4 years ago

This +1.

I have a similar setup and it definitely takes upwards of 20s for a cold boot. Though like mentioned above, I don't really do cold boots that often and my average uptime is about a 20 days (mostly rebooting to apply updates).

My guess is that doing proper power on self test (POST) stuff will always add a delay (having multiple network ports and 128G of RAM does not help).

Though a lot of modern OSes like Windows just cheat by hibernating instead of properly shutting down, so they can save on the time to load up stuff like drivers.

marttt5• 4 years ago

FreeDOS would boot in about 2 seconds, literally. :)

duped• 4 years ago

Fast boot is usually a setting that you can enable in your BIOS.

woodrowbarlow• 4 years ago

if you boot linux directly from efi (no bootloader), remove plymouth, and tweak your cmdline and mkinitcpio a bit, you'll shave a massive bulk off a mainline distro's boot time. boot to a lighter-weight login manager (or just getty) to save the rest. i bet you could get sub-second cold-boot time on that desktop, not counting the firmware stage.

mrguyorama• 4 years ago

My Windows PC, with a cheap low range samsung SSD boots from dead to Firefox playing a youtube video again in less than ten seconds. It's the main reason I haven't put much effort into fixing a dumb BSOD that is probably caused by the same SSD.

Nick87633• 4 years ago

If only my Dell could figure out how to transition out of a low power state and hand over control to the OS within 30 seconds.

tapanjk• 4 years ago

Today, you can reasonably expect a system to be done booting in a second ...

Unless you work for a large enterprise and your laptop is managed by IT. Not sure what goes on but getting from power on to the point where you can start using your laptop seems to take ages.

Doxin• 4 years ago

Roaming profiles would be my guess.

teddyh• 4 years ago

“One neat thing about Suns is that they really boot fast. You ought to see one boot, if you haven’t already. It’s inspiring to those of us whose LispMs take all morning to boot.”

— John Rose, Pros and Cons of Suns (1987)

RajT882• 4 years ago

I had a friend who bought a few netbooks years ago.

At the time they were fine for email and light web browsing.

Of course, as we know, such things bloat over time...

boboche• 4 years ago

Still got mine (900) running a low power linux and swapped the dead slow ssd to a 64gb somewat still slow drive. Not much use other than carrying on trips so if it gets stolen I wont care… its a shame to see so much good computers are thrown out while still perfectly working.

rdw• 4 years ago

I had one, and I wrote a lot of code on it. There was pretty much nothing else on the market that could do web browsing in that portable of a form factor, and at that price point. Steve was somewhat right to worry about them -- in an alternate history they would have taken over as the dominant form of computing, creating a whole evolutionary tree of tiny laptops, converged with keyboarded mobile phones, at all price points and build qualities.

The 11" Air I got to replace the Eee was much better in every single way. One note is that the thin-and-long of the Air was much more portable than the chunky but stubbier Eee. It just fits better into the kinds of bags we all have. The thinness wars started then.

russnewcomer• 4 years ago

In 2008 or 9, I had about 20 Eee 701s shipped to the international school I was the IT Director at in Central Asia to make a mobile computer lab, outfitted some Gorilla cases with power and foam, and had a pretty decent cheap expansion lab. The downside was that our internet was a 10:1 oversub’d satellite with a max 1mb (and that was upgraded from the 5:1 256k that we had been on) and the teachers wanted the lab to do internet-based projects, and between that and the 3 DDWRT’d Linksys routers that I had scrounged from the bazaar since I had no room out of my 10k tech budget for the year that had to cover _everything_ tech for the 400 student K12 school, it wasn’t a great solution for the actual problem, but those little machines were awesome at the time.

I know for most people, phones or tablets fit that gap, but I think I would prefer an Eee over my Surface Go for casual use, if just for the typing form factor.

DoktorDelta• 4 years ago

For a few years I had an X205TA "Eeebook" which was a bit of a mixed bag.

The battery life was stellar on the Atom processor, and the boot time was fast enough that I could save even more battery by shutting it down between classes.

The cramped keyboard and tiny screen, however, made it a pain to use sometimes, and 2gb of RAM meant having to be careful about what I had running to avoid seriously slowing it down.

When Windows 10 came around and PCs started upgrading without any user input, my laptop was among them. Unfortunately, the original operating system was the slimmed down "Windows 8.1 with Bing" that was intended for use on low-spec hardware. Windows 10 absolutely killed the performance and I had to grab a used Thinkpad Carbon to have something light but functional.

hattmall• 4 years ago

Damn, I had, still have the exact same one, managed to avoid the Win 10 upgrade and it worked well but my issue now is charging. Battery life was Amazing and it really was good enough for most stuff, just can't reliably charge even after 3-4 replacement chargers.

graderjs• 4 years ago

I had one. It was good. I installed Debian and Ubuntu on it (even dual booted with Windows). It was excellent. Very good little guy back in the day (around 2011).

I had two actually. I really loved them. Tiny, cheap but a real PC. Such a cutie. Brings back great memories of my Eee PCs. Loved it! :)

treve• 4 years ago

Are there any good, light, 11" cheap Linux (arm?) Laptops still on the market?

beatthatflight• 4 years ago

Loved my EeePC and my Asus R101 netbooks. Backpacked all over the world with them, they lasted for hours, could still code on them and edit photos, watch tv episodes and more. I mourn their passing.

bl_valance• 4 years ago

Have so many fond memories of my Eee PC 1005HA, running backtrack and taking it to coffee shops. Netbooks were just the ideal form factor at that time for running Linux.

post_break• 4 years ago

I had a 701. I loved that thing. I got linux on it and used it in college so much. I eventually upgraded to an 11" macbook air but man, that eeepc was a workhorse for me. Yes it was slow, but the battery life was incredible with the bigger battery and having a full OS laptop in a tiny form factor was amazing. What was even more incredible was that dell mini laptop.

Lerc• 4 years ago

The best thing I ever saw for the EEE PC was this glorious hack

https://beta.ivc.no/wiki/index.php/Eee_PC_Internal_Upgrades

hgazx• 4 years ago

The only thing I can think about when I read that is how terrible design was back in the day that there was so much empty space inside the case of a laptop that you could practically fit another laptop inside of it.

jefftk• 4 years ago

I loved my 701. Could take it anywhere, attach external monitor and keyboard if needed. I got it out again a few months ago and now my 8yo uses it.

schiffern• 4 years ago

While I (like many!) loved my Eee PC...

This Eee PC ran a “Pine Trail” processor so Joanna photographed it with pine branches. This was state-of-the-art tech blogging in 2009.

...it bothers me more than expected that the picture shows spruce branches.

#NotAllConifers

martin_henk• 4 years ago

Don't remember which one i had, but my eeePC was awesome... I even could turn it into a hackintosh.

ankaAr• 4 years ago

I still have one at home, was the last netbook my mom used before passed away. She loved it, and was running debían with life. Really amazing little piece of hardware.

nazgulnarsil• 4 years ago

These were a godsend. When I was living paycheck to paycheck I was able to get a CS degree on my $199 (black friday) 11" laptop.

protonbob• 4 years ago

I had the EEE PC 1005HA with osx 10.6 Hackintosh and ubuntu 10.04 installed. Maybe not so coincidentally, those are my two favorite operating systems. With a 2GB ram upgrade, it was more than enough for me to browse the Ubuntu forums and hang out on IRC. Also, to make horrible music with garage band.

winterpunk• 4 years ago

i ran an eeepc 701, then 1000HA, for seven years put together until the motherboard on the 1000HA died. maxed out the ram, installed an SSD, and expanded battery.

ran xmonad with lxde parts, and tiny little pixel fonts in my terminal. mostly used terminal apps, and firefox with noscript, vimperator, and sub-100% scaling.

probably the most bespoke computing experience i've ever bothered to put together. my sticker game was incredible. the phrase "FREE WIFI" was a strong contender for knuckle tats.

Animats2• 4 years ago

I still have four EeePCs. I had four of the original Linux-only model with the tiny keyboard and weird Linux distro. Those I got from a startup which bought a lot of them and found them useless. I replaced those with EeePC 1001 ("Seashell") models, which I buy on eBay for about US$30, wipe, and install Xubuntu.

They're convenient for things for which one might use a Raspberry Pi. You get a keyboard, screen, case, power supply, hard disk, battery, and ports. It costs more to build a Raspberry Pi up to that level.

That's what I use to run all those antique Teletype machines I restored. I have USB to 60mA 45 baud converters I built to interface them.

thrtythreeforty• 4 years ago

This was my high school computer! It was, shall we say, not top of the line. I tried compiling Linux and gave up at about the two hour mark.

That said, it was a great, if slightly small, little portable computer. Which was really mostly all I needed.

tiku• 4 years ago

Good times, I had a 1201N atom laptop. Long battery life, 12 inch screen etc.

jmmv• 4 years ago

I know it’s not the same, but if you are looking for a small form factor with a real OS, consider the Surface Go 3. I have the 2 and have really enjoyed it so far. Not the fastest thing in the world as you would expect, but I have even done some Rust coding in it while traveling. Perfect for VSCode remoting!

justinator2• 4 years ago

I had one of these! I brought it on a bicycle tour around Europe to stay in touch with my business, as I hopped on WiFi hotspots at all the McDonalds. I remember it being awfully slow but small enough to fit into the front bag of my bicycle, which is super, super wild now that I think of it.

coffee_beqn• 4 years ago

It was a traveling dream. You could do necessary PC things on it if you really needed to but it was painfully slow so you wouldn’t just spend time playing with it. It was absolutely tiny for it’s time so it fit in my backpack easily. It was a cheap piece of crap so I didn’t feel bad throwing it in my pack with dirty clothes and who knows what else and not have to worry about my $1200 business laptop. There really wasn’t anything like it at the time. It was a big hit from what I remember

justinator2• 4 years ago

It certainly had a buzz to it, and yeah: I didn't really worry about it getting destroyed.

I do remember the next time I rode a tour with a laptop (Paris to Amsterdam), I took my 2008 Macbook Pro. Survived the Paris Roubaix Cobbles!

tommica• 4 years ago

Ahh, the nostalgia - pretty sure I ran a 701 with windows and played space rangers 2 on it... Such a magical era, but wish I had done the same kind of Linux hacking as some of the other comments are talking about.

Edit: it might have been a 901 instead - and I was too poor to get an 1k series

dopeboy• 4 years ago

What a wave of nostalgia. Had the 901 during grad school in 2009. Bear in mind, the alternative at the time were huge, bulky laptops that ran hot with the fan on all the time. I had one of those at home, but I wanted something light on the go. And I was too poor for a smart phone.

Came preinstalled with Windows which I immediately ditched for Ubuntu. And despite my PTSD with linux on a laptop...everything worked! Even suspend!

Great battery life, super light, and surprisingly a great screen too. My main annoyance was how tiny the touchpad was and how loud the click buttons were.

Eventually I graduated and had a desktop at work. Later got a laptop and by then, the thinkpads were slimming down with decent linux support. Good times though - what an era.

krapp• 4 years ago

I still have my 701. I forget which small version of Linux is on it now, but it was best when it ran Fluxbox. Great for NES emulation.

kube-system• 4 years ago

Ugh, did I really pay $399 for a 701 and think it was a great deal? I guess I did.

I still remember the frustration that the screen height was so short (480px) that I couldn't reach the bottom of many ubuntu configuration panels.

Foobar8568• 4 years ago

I remember that I was tuning a 1TB sql server database on a 10" eeepc/USB disk to prove a client they badly misconfigured their server, I was getting 10times higher txn performance

Started with 701 with a 3g key, continued with 10" one and then in 2011, the MacBook air 11",these years were peak IT, dev and fun for me.

Light, powerful enough, connected and the pricing wasn't too bad (hi2u Sony books at 2k+)

pjmlp• 4 years ago

My 2009 Asus 1215B is still going quite alright, I needed to upgrade it to 8GB and replaced the HDD with a SDD, and in what concerns its use as travel netbook, it still manages to do its job.

Just don't ask him to do Rust compilations, or new GCC releases, unless plugged into mains.

However when it dies, I will most likely replace it for a 2-1 laptop, or a plain Air.

tobyhinloopen• 4 years ago

Schools (students) had EEE PCs over here. Also my family had multiple of them.

They were really popular

quadrifoliate• 4 years ago

I lived through this era as a student on a relatively tight budget, and must have been one of the few people who was never tempted to get a netbook instead of putting Linux on my regular 15" laptop.

The tiny screen size was the deal-breaker, and a complete no-go from my point of view. I don't understand how anyone got a decent amount of work done on these tiny netbooks.

squarefoot3• 4 years ago

EeePCs are still useful machines today. Need something that spits or receives packets for network testing? Grab a used one with decent battery life and you're done. Want to listen to online radio in the lab but don't want to use your phone? Again, get a used EeePC for peanuts and connect it to a pair of speakers. And what about a small IoT controller to be put in each room? Pair it with a networked VoIP terminal and voila, instant communications too. They're small, their power supply is small, the audio i/o capabilities are more than enough for some uses (1) and they have a physical Ethernet port which makes them perfect for network testing and other uses (web server testing, emergency on-the-fly file serving, etc).

(1) Before I bought a Zoom recorder, I used my Samsung NC10 to record my former band using Audacity. I had to build an external stereo mic preamp because I wanted to use two dynamic mics to keep noise low as the internal mic and circuitry weren't built with the sound pressure of a rehearsal room in mind, and the input expected a higher level than a dynamic capsule could produce. I later built a stereo mic using two Panasonic WM61a electret capsules so I could get rid of the preamp; today I would use a pair of AOM-5024L-HD-F-R capsules, which are super cheap and super silent.

marttt5• 4 years ago

I recorded an almost 2-hour live radio show with a Dell Mini 9 + Tiny Core Linux + Avid Mbox 2 audio interface + 2 dynamic mics + a small console recording program just two weeks ago. I configured a huge swapfile just in case, but everything worked flawlessly. Since the Mini 9 is fanless and SSD-equipped, it makes a really nice, completely silent machine for audio recording.

Interestingly, I also have a bunch of Panasonic WM61a capsules (I intended to do binaural recordings, but didn't). And, before the Dell, I often used a Zoom H1 as audio interface for an old Thinkpad T42 (hey, it had that keyboard and an IPS screen, so it was really hard to give up on!). :) Also, thanks for the reference to the AOM capsules. I didn't know about these, but had wondered whether there are any current replacements for the WM61a-s.

A Mini9/NC10/T42 + Zoom H1 + homemade WM61a/AOM-based microphones would make an awesome setup for a frugal, but somewhat knowledgeable audio geek. Given some skills and minor time for tinkering, you can really do pretty much everything with 10-15-year old hardware, or even ridiculous widgets like those microphone capsules. I think this is an extremely relevant point or realization, considering climate change and the still widespread throw-away-culture. We are drowning in old electronics. It is an incredible time to live in.

squarefoot3• 4 years ago

Also, thanks for the reference to the AOM capsules

You're welcome. I read some reports of them around a while ago and looking at the data sheet was amazed about their s/n ratio: 80dB! From a €3.03/pc at Digikey capsule! I'll be relocating in a couple months so with half the gear already packed I'm not going to start new projects right now, but my 1st use case will be small clip-on mics for a acoustic drumset; the physical construction will probably represent a bigger challenge than the electronics itself.

We are drowning in old electronics. It is an incredible time to live in.

And some of it is still convenient to use. All my PCs but one are used or refurbished, including the NAS. It's amazing how much one can save by doing in the meantime also a service to the planet.

gattilorenz• 4 years ago

All to run a deeply-annoying version of Windows

That’s only the later models based on 7 starter edition. My 1000H simply ran XP (maybe Home Edition, then replaced with Pro, but for most people that wouldn’t be a big difference).

As with most people here, it wasn’t a beefy machine, but in my university years I did _everything_ on it, including running virtual machines in VirtualPC and VMware Workstation and turning it into a Snow Leopard Hackintosh.

Aloha• 4 years ago

Did anyone actually buy a netbook? The only people I ever met who had netbooks were other tech writers; at one memorable trade show my colleague Adi Robertson showed up with both a gigantic gaming laptop and a tiny netbook, two laptops both perfectly ill-suited for the tasks at hand.

The only people I knew who had them, bought them used. I don't think I know anyone who bought one new.

mrgriscom• 4 years ago

A walk down memory lane for sure... I loved my Eee PC 901 and still have it. I used it to build a 'carputer' / navigation system before I had a smartphone. http://mrgris.com/projects/birdseye/

I remember becoming disillusioned that the netbook branding pivoted to "cheap" rather than "compact". The 9" series was quickly abandoned, with much more expensive 10" models becoming standard. An "almost laptop"-sized laptop for "almost laptop" prices wasn't really compelling. The 901 was adorably small and only cost $400 iirc.

cracrecry• 4 years ago

I had one of those. It was amazing to carry around. I changed the default screen that was so small. But Microsoft entering the scene simply ruined it all.

We used multiple of those in the robotics laboratory. There was a scene of people putting components and was great for adding sensors and so on with minimal effort.

My current laptop is an Apple Air M2. Samsung just preferred Microsoft money than competing. I believe it was the intention from the start.

Marazan2• 4 years ago

The 901 was the sweet spot (if you got it with the 6600 battery)

Samensize as thr 701 but bigger screen. Powerful enough to rin Eclipse (i kid you not, did a lpt of development on that thing), massive battery life.

It was a great machine, rugged, took a hell of a beating.

marssaxman• 4 years ago

I did the same, though I wasn't running Eclipse. That machine was the beginning of my shift from using Mac OS in daily life and Linux on the server, to... using Linux everywhere all the time. It was so light, rugged, and cheap that I felt comfortable tossing it in a bag and taking it anywhere. It got more use than my Macbook.

jonassalen• 4 years ago

I had a netbook. It was great to take with you on hliday or on public transport. I mostly used it to watch movies while on the train :)

steaktartaar_• 4 years ago

I did my entire IT degree on an Eee PC and I won't hear a bad thing said about it. It was the only working laptop I could afford and with Debian on it it was an IRC/shell/light browsing beast.

cstross• 4 years ago

The physical form factor is still around today, if you want a notebook PC that's smaller than an ultrabook.

Current flag carrier is probably the GPD P2 Max from Sheznhen's Gamepro Devices, a firm who started out making linux-based handheld game consoles around 2013 then branched out into netbooks. The first GPD Pocket stuck a maxed-out version of the Intel netbook spec sheet in a machined aluminum body with a 7" screen (underpowered processor and all) but newer models include less underpowered devices. In particular the P2 Max has the same footprint as the Eee 701/901 models but is thinner and lighter -- at 650 grams and 1.4cm thick it's comparable to an iPad mini with a keyboard -- thanks to the metal unibody construction.

https://gpd.hk

There are also competitors from elsewhere, notably One Netbook's One Netbook A1, which can be ordered with either an RS-232 port or gigabit ethernet if you work in a data center and want a portable terminal:

https://1netbook.com

Both companies also do tiny gaming portables with Windows 10/11 and the ability to drive an external GPU.

So basically the netbook sector is alive and well, if yuo want something significantly smaller than an ultrabook.

Finally, if these models strike you as too pricey -- they're not aiming at the same price point as the Eee -- there are less powerful variants on the theme from Chuwi and various nameless Chinese vendors. Just poke around on AliExpress for a bit and you can find a 440 gram micro-laptop for a reasonable price (if you don't mind waiting a lot).

jabbany4• 4 years ago

Was about to say this. The netbook (and in extension UMPC) niche never really died. It was a niche a decade ago and it's still a niche today.

One thing I will say is that, these tiny devices never fail to seem magical to the general public. I own (and from time to time use) a OneMix 2S Yoga, and even in this day and age with our smartphones and thin-and-light laptops, every time I pop it out on a bus or plane or at a conference, countless people strike up a conversation asking me what "that tiny laptop(/macbook*)" is...

* With the lid closed, the all-aluminum build does make the onemix 2s look like a shrunken down older Macbook Pro...

jollyllama2• 4 years ago

It never died, but the durability and modularity of the EEE PCs has no analogue today.

a0-prw• 4 years ago

I bought one in 2008, installed Debian. It's very slow but still works perfectly. Very light use, for the past 10 years.

mothsonasloth• 4 years ago

I still have an Acer Aspire One (522) that I use for VAG diagnostics, as a laptop is too cumbersome to have inside a car whilst plugged in.

This little Netbook served me well for light work, travelling and light gaming surprisingly.

Never a bad memory of it, and upgrading aspects of it was fun to try and squeeze more out of it.

https://tomaytotomato.com/acer-aspire-one-upgrade-2014-2/

oniony• 4 years ago

I must have used my Acer Aspire One for a decade. Such a great little laptop. In fact the only reason I upgraded (to a reconditioned IBM ThinkPad) was because it was 32 bit.

omnibrain• 4 years ago

The mid 2000s were really a time of change and tech commodification. From a german perspective, it started with the first "1000€ Laptop". The first new decently sized, decently specced Laptop selling for a price of less than 1000€.

Later came the Netbooks. That put portable general purpose computers for the first time into the hands of students who had trouble affording a "real" Laptop. You could immediately see the change in the university library and computer pools.

After my "regular" Laptop broke I was in a bit of bind financially, but was glad to be able to afford a Samsung NC10. And I must say I really liked it. I cold take it everywhere. It was powerful enough for text processing, powerpointing, webbrowsing and older games. Keyboard and screen where ok, but coming from a resolution of 1400x1050 on my old Laptop I especially mised vertical screen real estate.

mkjonesuk• 4 years ago

Small form factor laptops are my love. I still use the discontinued MacBook that was smaller than any of the Air models. It's underpowered and the battery is going but it's still more than enough for what I need it to do.

It'll be a sad day when it breaks.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

If I am not mistaken (no doubt someone will correct me if I am) some models of the EeePC were not vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown. At least, I remember checking on the one I have and seeing that it was not vulnerable. A truly slow, low power CPU. I loved the VGA textmode on the EeePC. It looked great.

Alas, the battery died some years ago and lately it will not even power on when plugged in. The blue lights and the red one come on when I press the power button but only briefly then turn off. The red link will blink while plugged in. I would like to salvage the HDD. What are the chances I can remove the HDD and retrieve the data. It is not a 701 but a later model 1015px from circa 2012. The keyboard is in mint condition as I never used it. I only used a USB keyboard.

IMHO, today's Chromebooks pale in comparison. Fewer USB ports and no Ethernet.

nathell• 4 years ago

I got myself a 1000HE (2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD) in 2009, installed Ubuntu (was it Jaunty?) on it, and loved it. I got the slightly heavier one, with a 6-cell battery with uptime touted as 9.5hrs; in reality it was more like 6-7 hours, but still great for the day. I used it as my main machine up until 2014. Did a lot of Clojure hacking on it. It even got me a job at one point.

It was rugged, too! Carried it around with myself everywhere. At one point I dropped it from ~1 metre (my backpack slid off the arm), and some plastic was chipped off the case with the hit, but the little thingy continued to work. It eventually developed a line of green-dead pixels on the screens, but was still usable.

In 2019, I wasn’t using it anymore, so I gave it away to someone who needed to complete their M.A. thesis while travelling on a budget. I loved that ten years in, the little thingy was still useful.

Looks like I have a separate heart for tiny computers. Now I have a GPD Micro PC, which reminds me of the 1000HE in many ways.

rejor121• 4 years ago

I read the article twice, and the only takeaway I can remember is, the Eee-pc that ran a custom Linux distro was better than anything that came after it.

yk• 4 years ago

My eee is remarkable how much the thing found uses, first as intended to have a computer while commuting, what 5 years later smart phones would do, then for a very long time it sat in my living room as a always on email terminal, in which role it easily delayed buying my first tablet by a first year and then until two years ago as a podcast player next to my bed. Thing is, I'm considering to reinstate it, since right now my phone does that and I'm not sure being able to check twitter when just woken up in the middle of the night is actually an advantage. So, really just an amazingly useful design.

bvm• 4 years ago

I know it sounds odd, but the 701 and the 901 had two of the best keyboards I've ever used. Absolutely beautiful little machines.

timw4mail2• 4 years ago

Yeah, despite the cramped spacing, the 701 has a great-feeling keyboard.

niffydroid• 4 years ago

Got one of these during my second year of uni. Couldn't afford a full blown laptop, this handled the job good enough for me. I was able to read class notes, do some coursework on it when the lab was full. Even got it run a LAMP stack for some coursework. I still have this in my loft space, I just can't bare to get rid of devices.

FpUser• 4 years ago

I've had "Eee PC" / Netbook for many years as my travel entertainment companion. I still have and use for the same purpose their newer thin and tiny Laptop (forgot what it is called) which is essentially netbook in anything but name

bigDinosaur• 4 years ago

I'm actually surprised people have such good memories of these horrible things. Perhaps I missed something. If the iPad grew out of Netbooks then it's like it junked its own DNA and stole some good stuff from somewhere else.

jabbany4• 4 years ago

I mean they really weren't that bad back in the day, though I would say they're probably the antithesis of something like an iPad.

I had a Lenovo S10 netbook (Atom N270, WinXP, 1G RAM, 160G HDD) that I used from high school to the first years of college and it was actually great for everything I needed it to do -- writing code and reading documentation -- and never broke a sweat. I did Perl, Java (Swing & Android dev), JavaScript, PHP, C++, and Flash/ActionScript development and dual booted Linux (Fedora).

The thing I really appreciated was that even though it was really cheap -- cheap enough that as a high school student I had my own laptop instead of having to share the family computer -- it did everything any other bigger laptop could do. I had both WiFi and Bluetooth (which could not be taken for granted back in the day), an SD card reader, mic and headphone jacks, and even a PCMCIA slot!

Sure, netbooks were not _better_ at anything compared to a laptop, but they also largely didn't have any hard limitations. It allowed anyone to just dive deep in and tinker and customize. On the contrary, an iPad (especially those first & second generation ones) was no more than an appliance like a toaster or fridge. It had a fixed set of things it could do, and anything outside of it was impossible.

Heck, if I was to only have _one_ computing device today and had to choose between current model iPad and a nearly two decade old netbook, I'd take the netbook any day. An iPad is doomed to forever be a secondary device, but a netbook, should you be so willing, can be your primary computer.

avip3d• 4 years ago

Those are the OG-Netbooks!

levi_n• 4 years ago

I still have my Eee PC [1]. Haven't used it in forever and a day, but it was awesome at the time, especially with the EeePC specific linux distros that were available at the time.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/XY1IayV.jpg

iostream25• 4 years ago

This is a great opportunity to remind everyone about the extremely negative dampening effects Micro$oft has had on innovation in both hardware and operating systems.

It's a monopoly and should have been broken up. We still can barely find OEM-installed Linux laptops, and an entity the size of Dell or Asus could easily float their own distro or add support dollar$ to an existing one.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

And they were incredible. A $200 laptop you could buy in 2007 that ran Linux and had flash storage. I credit mine with learning the command line for the first time.

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

I worked for 2 years with a netbook as a main machine. A Samsung N250; I might have bumped up the RAM to 2GB.

I could carry it everywhere and it was fast enough for KDE, Arch Linux and web development.

I was also young enough not to have problem with the 11' screen.

I think the screen broke during an hackathon (I think it fell) and I just plugged it to an external screen and kept on working.

UncleSlacky• 4 years ago

I've still got my 701 4G (it was my daily driver from 2008 to 2016) - I've had to replace the keyboard and power supply and upped the RAM to 1Gb. It runs Haiku OS currently (really well, despite the screen resolution being "officially" below requirements). It'll also run antiX, Q4OS Trinity, Refracta, Void, Alpine and FreeBSD reasonably well.

999900000999• 4 years ago

Back in 2015 I had a Chromebook I installed Ubuntu on.

It was slow, but looked amazing with an HD screen before they were super common. Plus it was only $300.

I always thought Microsoft could have absolutely owned the ultra low end market If they had the right people in charge. Smart people work there, it's just like there's more ideas floating about than focus.

jollyllama2• 4 years ago

I had one that I was glued to during my adolescence, constantly IM'ing with friends during the twilight of IM, before smartphones became dominant. Extremely durable, it was more capable than you would think. The lack of devices of a similar quality and form factor is extremely dissapointing; everything's lighter now but also flimsier. They were one of the greatest consumer devices of the era.

I still keep an old EEE PC around running XP, airgapped, for compatibility with old hardware I collect that VMs run into USB issues around. Runs great, parts are still available.

JohnBooty• 4 years ago

Are there modern "netbook" style cheap laptops with upgradable RAM/HDD?

One of the joys of netbooks (for me) was throwing 4GB or 8GB or RAM and an SSD into those things. At which point they become pretty credible performers for a lot of things.

But every time I look into such things these days, I can't find any upgradeable ones.

ncake• 4 years ago

Still using one as a daily driver to write code and read articles on. (1gb ram, 1.6ghz, Win 7)

It's painfully slow at browsing some websites, but runs VSCode and all of the dev tools just fine. There's some weird pleasure in knowing that if your stuff runs on that, it will run anywhere.

type04• 4 years ago

Asus should be praised for their Eee PCs, don't underestimate how many people were introduced to Linux thanks to the low end specs that were almost unusable with Windows

esel2k• 4 years ago

I loved my Eee PC from Asus and had a dark blue one (which was the better model). It was back in 2008/09 when I was bagpacking in central and southamerica. It was great to use it at the hostels instead of waiting for getting a free spot on these public PC. People back then either went to cybercaffe/internet caffee or waiting to use the few slow PC at the hostel and had to pay for it.

Asus put out like 40 models of a laptop called the “Eee PC” (2021)

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