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I've had my eee for a few days now and have begun to explore all of its features and so have decided to write a short review of my findings. Power - It turns on incredibly fast. And it powers down even faster. Great for on the move. Especially since my PC at work running XP takes at least 5 minutes to boot. The eee takes more like 10 seconds at the most. It comes with one battery pack. I haven't yet checked the price and availability of spares, but the fact its a detachable battery and not inbuilt looks promising. The power cable comes with and attached velcro band for easy tidying. Great design feature. Wifi- The wifi capability is easy to configure. But I did notice that it sets connection of wifi networks to 'manual' by default. Which means if you power down and back up again, it won't be connected. Worse, it lets you configure this connection again, making you think it didn't save. The problem seems to be that there are two wifi tools, one for adding a new network, and the another for connecting to existing networks. Once I worked that out however, I set my home wifi network to 'On Boot' instead of 'Manual'. Now it connects automatically without problems. Network- Connecting to network shared drives was painless and took no configuration once the wifi was enabled. Even to windows shares. Internet- Web access is via Firefox, have had no problem with it. Messenging uses pidgin. I'm not sure if thats a new development because an earlier review I read said it used kopete. Given the eee has a built in webcam, I'm surprised pidgin doesn't seem to support it. You'd think they'd provide a messenger that can actually use the hardware! Unless its me and I haven't worked out how to activate it. Possible because I've never used a webcam before. I haven't tested Skype or the other internet apps yet. I think a lot of them are just links to web pages anyway. Work- Oddly they've put the offline Mail prog (Thunderbird) in the 'Work' folder rather than internet. Other than this they have quick links to Open Office word processor, spreadsheet and 'presentations', a pdf reader (Adobe Reader), a file manager (by Xandros), a dictionary (which in addition to English definitions also gives translations to Chinese. Handy if you can actually read Chinese I suppose! An accessories subfolder contains a calculator, a PID and Screen Capture. Not sure why they need to be in a subfolder. Learn- There seems to be some educational programs/games for kids/students. A periodic table, a planetarium (kstars), a typing tutor, a letter/spelling game, a hangman game, some maths games and tutorials, a couple of paint programs (but no GIMP), and a link to an online learning website, http://www.skoool.ie Play- Here we have games, including TuxRacer which plays very smooth, a sudoku game, the obligatory tetris clone and solitaire and a couple of others. We also have a media player (smplayer) which seems to work well so far although I've only looked at a wmv file so far. A music manager (amarok), which I've been impressed with so far, to the extent I might get this for my desktop pc! A photo manager (gwenview), which I am again very impressed by. Makes me think I've been missing out on some great linux software through lack of contact with other linux users. A webcam program allows you to view and capture stills and video via the webcam. And a sound recorder allows you to record, although I'm assuming you'd need to actually connect a mike to use that. Settings- I'm a bit disappointed with the customisation. There are basically four coloured themes, all of them quite bright. You'd think on a laptop with a battery life of only a few hours that an energy saving light on dark colour scheme should be available. Apparently not. An anti-virus program is also available here, as is configuration for printers and other stuff, like voice commands. Overall- The small keyboard works well for me because my hands are small, but I'm not sure how much you want to use it if you have bigger hands. I mainly got mine to use on train journeys, so I won't be sitting at it for hours on end. A nice feature is that a special 'fn' key turns the F keys into short cuts for raising/lowering the brightness/volume, mute/unmute, turning the wifi on/off etc. I'm really pleased with my purchase and feel it will meet my needs for a more than reasonable price. Other things of note- Not surprisingly this toy has had a strong appeal amongst other techie types, such as programmer colleagues and IT staff. However, the big reaction I've had has been interest from women. Including my mum. Words like 'cute' and phrases like 'I want one even though I'm not sure I'd use it' get bandied about. And everyone is stunned when I tell them the price... :) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html