This interesting story at Computerworld UK came to via @sascha_p through Twitter. There are some very tasty nuggets of information in the story that looks at data collected via a PriceGrabber.com Consumer Behavior Report.

It seems that the emerging (or "nascent" in Apple's words) netbook category has manufacturers in a "race to the bottom", according to a Sony representative, and that traditional notebook sales are being cannabalised.

I know many netbook owners (I have a couple of them myself) and no a single one of them uses the netbook as their main computer. However, it has in some cases brought them into the notebook market. For example, some folks have a desktip system and would like a notebook. Until recently, that meant an investment of several hundred dollars just for an entry level unit. Now, they can buy an entry level Eee PC for about $330AUD. In that sense, they actually making the mobile computer market larger.

However, in these depressed economic times, many are skipping on the current round of laptop replacements and are either hanging on to older hardware or replacing with a netbook.

Are you contemplating a new notebook? Is a decent netbook in your calculations?

Over at Hydrapinion I've mused on what I do to avoid my data becoming fragmented while I'm out of the office.

The problem is, when I'm away from the office for more than a few hours, something that happens practically every day, the information I have on my laptop and the information back home are out of sync.

 Data • Mobility

For a bunch of reasons the Eee PC ships with either Windows XP (I'm sure Microsoft's still annoyed at that) or a customised version of Debian Linux. Both work reasonably well although my experience is that Linux doesn't seem to suffer from the same performance degradation as XP over time. Personally, I've ditched both default operating system options, preferring to run Ubuntu for the Eee.

As part of a story I've penned for PC Update, I've been playing with the beta release of Windows 7 (Build 7000). I expected to run into some hurdles with my Asus Eee PC 900 as the installation requires about 9GB of contiguous disk space. My Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but it's split between 4GB and 8GB disks. Interestingly, the installation actually failed but then restarted and succeeded. I'd seen this with previous versions of Windows but it seems that the installer is smart enough to start over but skip the problematic files.

I expected to encounter all sorts of issues with with the PC. However, Windows 7 lacked the correct video drivers meaning that I was initially stuck with standard VGA. This was something of a surprise as the video chipset is an older one but perhaps Microsoft is sending a message about support for older computers. Resolving the video driver issue was easy enough as the Windows XP driver seems to work perfectly.

The wireless networking worked without any messing about. In fact, the only hardware that didn't work with the Eee PC was the integrated webcam. However, to be fair, the main problem was that Asus made the appropriate Windows XP driver hard to find.

To get Windows 7 running nicely I needed to make a few tweaks. Windows 7, by default, offers to manage the best balance between performance and appearance options. However, I found the Eee PC a little sluggish but by turning off many of Windows 7's interface animations there was a significant boost in performance.

The Eee PC took about 2.5 minutes to start up and be usable. Launching Internet Explorer took about five seconds although, once it it was loaded it performed quite well. The Eee PC 900 running Windows 7 was by no means unusable and on a par with Windows XP, the OS that shipped with this particular Eee PC.

Windows 7, at least in the current beta release, shows great promise. It seems slim enough to install and performance is certainly OK. If Microsoft can resist the urge to add more features and concentrate on stability then Windows 7 might end up being an excellent option as a mobile operating system.

In researching what will be one of many stories on Windows 7 I'm sure I'll write over the next few months, I've been installing the beta version of Windows 7 (Build 7000) on just about any PC I can get my hands on. One of my test systems is an Eee PC 900.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, the pertinent specifications of the Eee PC 900 are:

Display: 8.9" Display running at 1024 x 600
CPU: Intel® Celeron M353 clocked at 900MHz
Networking: WLAN Built-in 802.11b/g and RJ45 10/100 Mbps
RAM: 1GB of DDR II
Storage: 4GB and 8GB disks and SD/MMC slot
Webcam: 1.3MP

As you can tell, this is not going to be a Windows powerhouse. In fact, the Windows Experience Index (a measure of how well a system will run Windows 7) gives a score of just 1.0 - the lowest score. It's worth noting that this score is a reflection of the system's "weakest" component. in the Eee PC 900's case the integrated graphics card pulled the score down.

The Eee PC actually fails to meet one of Windows 7's minimum requirements - available disk space. To install Windows 7 you'll need 9GB of free, contiguous disk space. The Eee PC 900 has a total of 12GB but that's spilt into two separate disks of 4GB and 8BG. However, I was still able to complete the installation with about 1GB of space left on the larger disk. The installation did fail on the first attempt but when I started it over it was able to complete. I had the same experience on another system so it seems that the installer is smart enough to skip over problematic stages.

Once Windows 7 was installed (about an hour using an external DVD drive), it booted up perfectly. It's worth noting that Microsoft has really managed to get the installation process right. Other than some localisation information, I was able to walk away from the installation and come back once it had completed. There weren't any "Click to Restart" dialogs or other such nonsense.

I wasn't all that surprised to find that the Eee PC 900's display was limited to plain VGA after the installation. Clearly, Microsoft hasn't included every possible hardware driver. However, on the Eee and other systems, i;ve found that Windows Vista and XP drivers work just fine. The only potential "gotcha" is that the driver installers provided by manufacturers may not work. in that case, run them in compatibility mode for XP or Vista and they should be fine. I ran the Eee's driver installer in XP compatibility mode and it worked well. You won't get the full Aero experience but I'm not sure that it's worth the overhead in any case.

Using Windows 7 on the Eee PC was surprisingly good. I had low expectations but found that even with some antivirus software installed the system was reasonably responsive. However, I'd strongly suggest that anyone using Windows 7 on such an underpowered system go into the Performance Setting and manage those settings yourself rather than letting Windows work it out for you. I disabled almost every visual enhancement other than "Use visual styles on windows and buttons". This made a significant improvement to the Eee PC's overall zippiness.

Wireless networking worked without any problems although my impression is that wireless range is a little weaker under Windows 7 than XP or Ubuntu. As radio strength can be controlled by software it may be that a driver update will fix this. However, the difference wasn't huge and certainly didn't impact my testing. It was just that places that had a solid five bars of signal now drifted between four and five bars.

I've not been able to get the webcam working yet. It needs a driver but I can't find my Eee PC CD at the moment and I could find the driver on the Asus website. I suspect that once I find a driver it'll be fine. Perhaps someone's sorted that out. If you have, leave me a comment or use Twitter to let me know.

Finally, I've noticed that the power management side of things still needs some work and that the suspend/resume functionality is a little broken. It's not a showstopper for me as the Eee PC isn't a main system for me (my MacBook Air is my principal mobile computer).

What I'd like to see in a future release of Windows 7 is a "netbook" installation. I know that would add a step to the installation process but being able to leave off stuff like the games and some of the accessories would slim the installation back leaving more hard disk free. Also, I suspect that I'll be able to eek out further performance gains by playing with the service that launch automatically. I'm not too fussed about the driver issues - this is Beta 1 so it's not surprising that it's not 100% complete.

If your Eee PC 900 (or better - I don't recommend Windows 7 for an Eee PC 700) isn't a critical working machine for you and you can spare the bandwidth, installing Windows 7 certainly won't hurt your system.

I recently penned a story for PC Update - the magazine published to Members of the world's second largest PC user group, The Melbourne PC User Group.

The story is a review of a couple of members of the Eee PC family; the Eee Box and Eee PC 1000h.

We can see the Eee Box finding a place in many homes and small offices. Given the $429 purchase price, a home network with two or three Eee Boxes and a decent NAS for centralised storage would be a very functional arrangement. However, if you crave lots of grunt for playing the latest games then the Eee Box B202 is not suitable.

When it comes to the Eee PC 1000h, it's a more difficult recommendation. It's a very good unit but there's a lot of competition in the laptop market around that price-point.

You can read the whole article here.

 Eee Box • Eee PC