The Asus Eee PC is one of the coolest tools/computers you can find at the moment. It came to Spain a few weeks ago and it is 300 euro worth.
A colleague brought me the Eee from the US so I have been tweaking it for a while.

The main tweaking areas of the Asus Eee PC are:

• Operative System: Tested most of the Eee OS.
• Firefox: Specific tweaking for Mozilla Firefox in an Asus Eee PC.

Operative System:

I rate an operative system through these 5 items:

1. Boot speed: This is the most important. Since the Eee is a travel-handy gadget, it needs to boot fast to be useful (about 1 minute or less).
2. Performance: Just don’t waste me time. I love those colorful effects but please load Firefox fast and don’t lag with 10 tabs.
3. Ease of use: With 2 clicks I should access or find anything.
4. Tools for everything: When I open my Eee, I may be a few miles from home. I may not have Internet access so it should be necessary to have everything needed.
5. Troubleshooting: If I ever have an issue with it, will I be able to find a solution through Google or friends?

Tip for Linux: set GRUB waiting time to 0. You will save 5 to 10 seconds.

Tip for Windows: use Portable Applications instead of normal ones. You will save a lot of space.

 

Tip: Use Google Docs as a replacement for Office, you can install Google Gears (Win and Linux) to be able to work offline.

Xandros

I first tried Xandros but it wasn’t powerful enough:

1. Speed: Excellent (less than 1:00)
2. Performance: Really good
3. Easy: Really good
4. Tools: Very poor
5. Troubleshooting: Acceptable

EeeXubuntu

So then I gave EeeXubuntu a try and it was really convincing:

1. Speed: Really good (1:10 boot time)
2. Performance: Good
3. Easy: Really good
4. Tools: Really good
5. Troubleshooting: Good

Had to re-install (sometimes its quicker for me to backup and re-install whole OS than tweaking and troubleshooting misterious Linux issues).

UbuntuEee

I installed UbuntuEee. Gnome instead of Xfce (which made it loose performance but gain troubleshooting):

1. Speed: Acceptable (1:30 boot time)
2. Performance: Good
3. Easy: Excellent
4. Tools: Excellent
5. Troubleshooting: Good

MS Windows XP

Finally decided to test Windows. Installed a lighter version through nLite.

1. Speed: Acceptable (1:30 boot time after installing basic apps: drivers, Firefox, antivirus)
2. Performance: Sufficient
3. Easy: Excellent
4. Tools: Excellent
5. Troubleshooting: Excellent

Mac Leopard OSX

Not recommended at all.

1. Speed: Slow
2. Performance: Really poor
3. Easy: Very good
4. Tools: Very poor
5. Troubleshooting: Very poor (no sound, no Fn keys, etc…)

Firefox

Recommended extensions

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