Asus Eee PC 701

The device comes in five different colours: white, pink, blue, green and black, so you can say that there is something for all tastes. The one small problem tough is that at this time you will only find the black or white versions for sale. The rest of the package is made up of a soft neoprene satchel, an ingenious two-in-one 110-220 volt power adaptor so that you can use it in all countries and a Lithium-Ion 4 5200 mAh battery. For more information about the battery life and power use of each component, don’t hesitate to consult this article at eee-PC.fr.

You will also find, besides the technical documentation, a reinstallation DVD of the Xandros operating system that is a light version of the Linux distribution. The OS installed on the flash memory makes it very reactive, using about 2.3GB of disk space, which leaves about 1.7GB for the user. It goes without saying that the Eee PC is delivered without DVD drive, meaning that if you want to reinstall, you will have to connect an external USB one. There is another installation method, requiring a Windows PC and USB key (or memory card) which you can follow here.

The choice of Linux has its advantages here. The menu navigation is quick and this distribution uses less space and resources that any other. We aren’t disputing the judicious choice of this package, especially in terms of cost compared to a Windows license which would have raised the price of the product. You should know though that you can install Windows XP on the Eee PC by creating a CD or light USB version from your Windows XP CD with the help of nLite. Asus is also offering the Eee PC with Windows installed on a 4GB drive from March. Nothing prevents you from also installing another Linux distribution (EeeXUbuntu for example). Finally, you can potentially install Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard, even if there is little interest in this. Besides, this for the moment is completely illegal, remember!