Is anyone using the EEE PC?

[Steve Dickie]

We've been thinking about getting some Asus EEE PCs. Is anyone out there using them in an educational setting? Thoughts? Concerns? Recommendations?

Thanks,
Steve

[Janene Kosman]

No, we just went to Walmart. It was nice not to have to worry about getting a power strips that would accommodate a huge transformer as the EPC plugs are the small 2 prong type.

[Pam McLeod]

Janene, Lori sent me here. What a great and creative idea! I'm putting together a grant application and it's very time-sensitive, do have an estimate of what you paid for the cart + bins?

[Janene Kosman]

The cart was around $280 and the 16 bins were around $90

[Pam McLeod]

Janene, do you have timers on this cart, or do you plug in 32 simultaneously? We have 20A circuits.

[Ron Houtman]

Steve:

I bought an ASUS EeePC 1000H - the version with the XP Home. I bought it for right around $500. Currently, it's my 'unobtrusive - go to meeting - take notes' lappy, and I have no usability complaints about it.

Battery life is awesome - at about 6 hours (YMMV), which is why it's a great conference netbook.

The only thing that isn't my favorite, is the piano black glossy case. It's a fingerprint magnet, so having a nice microfiber towel in your bag is a must.

FWIW - some of these machines are being preloaded with Windows XP HOME versus Professional. If you want to login to your org's domain controller, you will need to have XP PRO... or you can hack XP Home to make it happen if you wish.

[Pam McLeod]

I just wanted to update you - like Lori, we are in New Hampshire, but did get the grant we applied for and will be buying ~64 linux netbooks (probably the Dells) in a few weeks. The project will be 1:1 in our 4th grade classrooms. I really appreciate the cart/bin information which came from this forum! I know at least a few other districts in our state will be doing similar projects.

By this summer, we should have a pretty good idea of the successes, challenges ... if you want to follow our progress, you can follow me on Twitter: altonNH .

Thanks again!
Pam

[Sherry McVay]

I've had my Dell Mini 9 (Ubuntu 8.04) for about a month and a quite happy with it. The keyboard is very good, they embedded the function keys to save space and that makes room for almost full size other keys. It prints to our network printers like a champ, we have Novell Netstorage, so no worries with network connections. The on board drive is solid state (unlike some of the other netbooks) so jiggles in a classroom are less of an issue. The case, like the above comment from Ron about his asus, is a finger print mess and the soft plastic is bound to show wear quickly. Battery life is close to 4 hours. I haven't used these with kids in a classroom, but would certainly be interested in giving it a try! I maxed out the options on this machine and still ended up under $500.

[Ric Wiltse]

Just got one for my 22 year old son for Christmas. He loves it and after seeing one, I'd like to get one. My son added the extra memory boost, which I recommend. Seems like a very good product.

[Ron Houtman]

I found that after I increased the RAM from 1GB to 2GB in my EeePC 1000H, the battery life increased by about 45 minutes (or so...). I figure that the hard drive isn't doing as many read/write cycles now that I have the added overhead. Now that I bought an iPod Touch, I'm finding that I am using the EeePC less than I did in the past. I'm thinking the iPod touch is rising quickly to the 'killer-device' stage in my life. The thing does pretty much everything, except slice bread.

[Dale Ehrhart]

I have an itouch and I love it, but it seems like you would need some kind of keyboard device for it to be viable in a school setting.

[Ron Houtman]

Yeah - the input issue is one thing that I see keeping the wider adoption of the iPod Touch in the K-12 arena from occurring. If it had Bluetooth, then maybe a nice external keyboard would work, like I had with my last Palm device.

There is hope though... TechCrunch has a rumor that there may be a larger form factor iPod ... in the offing for Fall 2009. Maybe BT will get put into the 'new Touch' - whatever that looks like.

[Dale Ehrhart]

Wow, that looks very cool.

With the itouch....I don't know why you couldn't have a wifi keyboard or one that docks through sync/charge port.

Have a Happy New Year, All.

Dale