Second Time Around
I took delivery of my second Asus Eee 701 today in Galaxy Black with RAM upgraded to 1G, identical to my first one in every way. This had to be done as my first one was stolen (sigh), but through my upset I have managed to glimpse a silver lining to the situation.
In short, I now have a chance to do things better.
With my first Eee, I swore to myself before getting it that I would stick with the initial Xandros Linux OS for at least a couple weeks, then try a few of the other Eee optimized Linux distros out of curiosity as I had never really tried to use Linux. Frustration and confusion however caused me to flee back to a nice, safe XP install after only two days. I know, not pretty, and I ain’t proud of it, but Linux ungeeked me. The difficulty of adapting Xandros to my needs, the seemingly unending amount of code I needed to enter with little or no documentation and the nightmare of installing applications from the repositories made me no better then a common citizen, running back to the shelter of what I knew. I intend to try a little harder this time to explore Linux, and have made the following goals for my second Eee based on my experiences with the first.
1) Experiment. I learned that it is dead simple and painless to install complete Operating Systems as it took a couple cracks with nLite to get the XP networking set up. Towards that end, I already have install CDs ready for the three Linux distros that most interest me (Mandriva, EeeDora and EeeXubuntu) and may also install Linpus. I will swap those around for the first few days to get a good feeling for the strengths and weaknesses of each. I will still probably end up with XP, but I want to make full use of this chance to be able to comment more intelligently on all major Linux options.
2) Discern. I found that in the few weeks I had the first Eee, the main thing I did with it was read, both books and comics and play Diablo II on the bus. Therefore, first things first I will install software for e-books, JPG comics and other similar media (and Diablo II). I may not need Word or OpenOffice at all, getting by with a WordPad type program. Either way, I want to be more careful with what applications I install this time around.
3) Optimize, optimize, optimize. In the end, I was just so happy to get an OS up and running well on my first Eee that I just installed all the off the shelf drivers Asus provided, whacked a bunch of standard software on and then stuck with it as I didn’t want to risk having to reformat again. Dumb. This time, I will make use of the plethora of streamlined drivers and utilities available out there to make the Eee run as fast and smooth as possible…and if it should get a bit hinky on me, just reformat it and start again. I am willing to spend a couple weeks tinkering before I let the device settle into a final form this time, since now I know how durable it is.
Sometimes, to really get the most out of a device, you need a second chance at it. This oughtta be fun.
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Any chance you could do a story on those “streamlined drivers”? Mentioning them without details(for the new unknowing)is like seeing a mirage to a dying man.