EEE Review Followup

Dave Black over at the Lutheran Technology Ning posed an interesting question. Basically he asked why would I buy a $400 Eee when I could spend $300 more on a regular laptop?

First, let me say I searched for about 10-15 minutes on Tiger Direct and Dell.com and could find no $700 laptop that had either Vista Business or XP Professional on it, unless it was a refurbished model or something off-lease. Best I could find is a Toshiba Tecra on Tiger Direct for $819. I did not attempt to find a Mac @ that price (cheapest on their website is 1099 for an introductory MacBook).

Here is why I would choose the Eee over those other machines.

• Battery Life - No machine in that price class is going to have 3 hours of battery life.
• Viruses/Spyware/Malware - There are very few of these types of annoying little programs that affect a Linux Box
• Weight - in this price category you are talking about 5 lbs plus. Also add in the weight of the charger. That is a BIG difference from the 2lb size of the Eee.
• Licensing - There is no office software included (beyond MS Works) in these kinds of machines, so loading Office Pro on them will set you back more money, on the Eee that productivty software is included.
• Gaming/etc - Games are notoriously big resource hogs and can cause problems on laptops. Students will be more likely to load their favorite game onto the laptop and therefore cause issues with bandwidth, software, etc.
• Boot-up times - 20 seconds from off to productivity on the Eee, we got new HP Laptops with Vista Pro loaded on them that take over 2 minutes to get to the login screen then another minute or two to get logged in. There just went 3-4 minutes of class time waiting for the machines to boot. XP might shave off a minute.

Now if you want to bump it up to the $1250+ Class of laptops and tablets you might shave some off the boot times and the office suite, but all of the other concerns are still valid. Oh yeah, and now you could have purchased 4 or more Eee's for each Laptop.