New Toy

I gave in yesterday and ordered an eee PC from Asus. It came today, and it's pretty slick.

Cheaper than my last Palm Pilot, it's a fully-functional laptop that has a 7" screen, a full keyboard (although small), a complete complement of useful software (word processor, presentation software, spreadsheet, music, video, photo, anti-virus, you name it), wi-fi, webcam, ethernet port, 3 USB ports and so forth.

It has 512 MB of RAM, and comes with a 4 GB flash drive for storage. It runs on Linux. I added an 8 Gb SD card, tripling the storage. $400 plus the cost of the SD card.

It's about the size of a trade paperback book and weighs less than two pounds. I anticipate that it will be useful for travel, enabling me to keep in touch, store photos, access the Internet, and so forth. It fits in my purse -- which my 17" HP laptop certainly won't.

It's certainly no substitute for the power of that HP laptop, but unless I have a major music project or video editing to do, it'll do the job.