EeePC

As you may have seen from some of my earlier posts (ie EeeBox) I am proud owner of an Asus EeeBox but this is not my first foray in to the (now vast) Eee brand area. I bought one of the early Eee PC 701’s when they came out towards the end of 2007 and was hugely impressed with it. OK the screen was a bit small but as a mobile device that could be used for basic web surfing and simple document editing it was great.

The market for these netbooks picked up dramatically after the success of the 701 and soon a whole host of manufacturers were competing in this area (not to mention the huge number of new models Asus introduced themselves). I kept my eye on the new machines as I wanted to upgrade to get the benefits of the larger screen. The MSI Wind almost had me but I eventually decided to stay with the Eee brand and plumped for a Eee PC 1000H instead.

 

Eee PC 1000

This has a 10″ screen (compared to the 7″ on the 701) and now came with the Intel Atom processor which increased the processor speed and also increased the battery life to around 6 hours (way better than the 2 or 3 hours I would be lucky to get with the 701). Another benefit is that I am using Windows XP on the 1000 whereas I was running Linux (Ubuntu) on the 701. I quite liked running Ubuntu for many things but found it very flakey with my Huawei 3G modem (constantly dropping connections etc) so am glad to get on to an OS where the 3G modem works perfectly.

For anyone thinking of getting a netbook this Christmas then I’d have to say you can’t go too far wrong with the 1000H (a small travel-friendly laptop with a decent sized keyboard and an 80GB hard drive to go along with the fantastic battery life).

[Before anyone comments, No I don’t have any sponsorship deal or anything with Asus but it just seems over the last year or so I’ve had some really good experiences with their hardware.]

Looking for a NAS

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, I’m currently looking into buying a NAS (Network Attached Storage) which will sit on the network and allow me to store and access my media (music, video etc) without having to keep a specific PC turned on all the time. As it’s just for home use I’m not looking to spend an absolute fortune on it but at the same time I want a decent amount of storage capacity.

I’ve done a bit of research and I think I know the device I’m going to get – an Edgestore NAS400 which has 4 hot-swappable drive bays, can handle up to 4TB of storage and has a 1GB LAN (4TB storage and 1GB LAN were the main features I was looking for). The device on it’s own costs about £300 and 4 1TB drives will cost about the same again.

 

Edgestore NAS400

My only worry at the moment is noise. I’ve checked out a few opinions on this device and have heard some say it is relatively quiet whilst others say it’s too noisy. It could be that the ones who said it is quiet are quite deaf or that there defective/old devices out there that are louder than others (I know my Xbox 360 is way quieter than one of my mates’)

Got to do a bit of saving as I want to get the device and the drives together (one without the other is pretty useless) but hopefully I’ll be able to get it in a few weeks and will post any further updates.

EeeBox (cont.)

Managed to add the USB switch last night and now have a working method of switching the mouse and keyboard from PC to PC.

 

USB Switch

EeeBox

My most recent purchase is for an Asus EeeBox which, at least initially, will be used as a simple web browsing machine. My main PC in the house is a custom built machine which is housed in a media centre case but the problem with this machine is the noise of the fans (the ones for the case and the graphics card primarily) so it’s not really ideal to have this running late at night. The EeeBox on the other hands runs almost silently and as an added bonus it’s uses very little power so make me feel like I’m being kinder to the environment!

Black EeeBox

The major use for the PC in our house is for web browsing and the EeeBox handles this brilliantly (using Google Chrome which is now my default browser). I still have my iTunes installation on the main PC but after the success of the last few days I’m going to look into migrating that to the EeeBox soon (starting up the main PC just to sync my iPhone is not ideal).

The size and styling of the EeeBox is fantastic (I bought the black version). It comes with a small stand (it can also be mounted on the back of a VESA compliant monitor) and it’s small dimensions mean that you can sit it on the desk to show off it’s looks or hide it somewhere out of the way where it won’t need much space.

One issue I have to resolve is how I interface with the 2 computers. I have an old switch box but this is an older PS/2 and VGA style device whereas these two newer machine use USB and DVI. I managed to pick up a Belkin Omniview KVM Switch which should have allowed me to share the monitor, audio and Keyboard/Mouse across both machines but sadly this didn’t work out. (I should have guessed when I picked it up so cheaply!)

On plugging in the power to the KVM switch (requiring power for a KVM switch was a surprise to me) I was instantly met with a very annoying beeping noise. I could get it to stop occasionally but ended up having to look further into it as it was not consistent. It turns out this was a common problem with this switch and the fix was to upgrade the firmware – via a Parallel port to ethernet plu cable that comes with the switch. Not very useful when neither of the newer machines has a parallel port! In the end I decided to cut my losses and binned the switch (most experiences I found about it were negative anyway!)

My Dell monitor has a number of inputs so have now set it up so that the main PC is plugged into the VGA port (using a VGA to DVI adapter on the PC) and the EeeBox is plugged into the DVI port and then I can simply switch between them using the button the front of the monitor. The main keyboard/mouse I use is a Microsoft Wireless setup that only requires a single USB plug on the computer. I have ordered a USB switch so I can (hopefully) plug the keyboard/mouse into it and then both computers to the other end and then switch the keyboard/mouse from computer to computer at the flick of a button.

Once that’s done I’ll probably combine the audio from both PC’s into the monitor speakers as usually only one machine will be making a noise at one time so there’s no real need for separate sound configurations.