A couple of months ago my laptop died; it lasted 5 years so I'm not complaining but the lack of a portable computing device started to get to me. I had heard a lot about netbooks originally but never looked any further until now.

I did a bit of research and the EeePC stood out to me, the Acer Aspire One was also a tempting buy because of it's price. In the end the choice came down to an EeePC 1000 or an EeePC 901; the 1000 has a larger screen and more storage space than the 901 but the size of the 1000 was starting to squeeze out of what you would call a netbook, so I decided to go with the 901 which has a 8.9" screen and half the storage size (SSD - 4gb + SSD - 16gb) of the 1000.

You can choose to buy the EeePC with Windows XP installed or with Xandros which is a linux distribution, I chose the Xandros version as it was cheaper and I was planning to get rid of it anyway. I decided to install a slightly modified version of Debian which is designed for the EeePC; so far I have had no problems; installation was excellent (pretty much like the normal Debian installer), the wireless adapter worked without any messing about with the drivers, the webcam worked, the touchpad worked and the sound worked after installing the latest ALSA drivers. I currently have KDE 3.5 which is running great and I am planning to move to KDE 4.2 once the Debian team decides to let it in their repositories.

So far I am really pleased with the EeePC and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a small, portable but pretty powerful computing device.