"Jim" wrote in message
...

wrote in message
...
On Aug 2, 10:30 pm, "Reginald P. Smithers III, Esq."
wrote:
John H. wrote:
On Sat, 2 Aug 2008 17:14:41 -0400, "D.Duck" wrote:

"John H." wrote in message
. ..
Am considering this laptop for my wife's birthday in a couple weeks.
Best
Buy has it on sale for $999. I'll add another gig of RAM and router.

http://tinyurl.com/59yons

Thoughts?
Unless she likes laptop keyboards and pointing devices I would
suggest an
external keyboard and mouse, either USB or wireless if you don't mind
fooling with batteries. I don't have a wireless keyboard but have
wireless
mice on two computers. The one that is used extensively gets 2~3
months
from a set of quality alkaline batteries.

She's never had a laptop, and neither have I. We'll see how she does
with
the built in stuff. I'd have to have the external mouse, as I can't
stand
that rubbing the pad stuff.

The keyboard and mouse just plug in via USB cables. While a 16" wide
screen, you don't really need it, but if you want you can also use a
larger monitor and use the laptop as a CPU when she is at her desk. I
am a few years away from buying a new computer, but I am really leaning
towards buying a Mac and MacPro laptop. My son and my youngest girl
will buy a Mac Laptop in the next month. You can get a 10% discount and
a Ipod Touch for any students or teachers, so your wife would qualify.
I think they are both leaning towards the 13" laptop to make it easy to
carry, and then use a larger monitor and keyboard in their dorm.

Vista is so awful that I cannot reccomend any machine with it. The
new ASUS EE 9" has a larger keyboard and screen and comes with Windows
XP or the Linux OS of the older 7" EE. My 7' EE is the best computer
I have ever seen for travel. The various utilities seem to be
compatible with most things and it is cheap (a little over $400
including a 16 GB SD card). Take a look at it. It has been so simple
to use that it amazes me when I go back to a Vista machine. It is
also small compared to these monster so-called laptops other people
use and it boots up in 25 seconds compared to over 4 minutes for a
Vista machine. Shut down is less than 12 seconds..

I picked up an Asus eee Surf 2G the other day. Out of the box, it was easy
to connect to the wireless internet. It came with Open Office which seems
to be quite robust. Most of my data files are in Microsoft Works and open
office wouldn't recognize them without first converting them to Microsoft
Office formats. File Manager is similar to XPs. It had a light on features
media player. I couldn't find a driver for my printer but my wife's
installed easily. There were some quirky issues with the screen, and touch
pad sensitivity, particularly with tapping.
There was no mail/news client so I tried to download and install
Thunderbird. I didn't have any luck with that, even following various
installation methods I found on line. The Linux distribution is a highly
customized version of Xantros and I think Asus messed with it to make it
difficult or impossible to install software. That's not good fore someone
who is a complete newbie to Linux and all of the terminology used in linux
is completely foreign to me. I couldn't even reset the computer to out of
box state as the manual describes. I am going to return this thing on my
way home from camping today.
My question is. Do you think the eee900 is more user friendly in terms of
ability to customize and add software? Is the touch pad any better than on
the 7" version? I need an excuse to try the 9in Asus but my intuition
tells me that I won't be happy with it. I know it can come with XP and
that will eliminate familiarity issues but I would like to try out linux
and break my dependency on Mickysoft.

OpenOffice is grossly under rated. I too recommend it for everyone.

http://www.openoffice.org/

For those that don't know where to get it.