He's going to buy Asus eee pcs

[witch]

The dep head has been playing with one of these and wants to buy a whole classes worth. We can't get them on the network so he is thinking of allowing one year group and one only to save to them and print directly. I am concerned about children changing the settings on them - is there anything else I should be flagging up?

[Kyle]

We can't get them on the network

Why not?

We've had no problem by putting XP Pro on.

[Joanne]

don't htye run like dogs with xp?

Oooh getting mine this month!

Won't he struggle to get 30 witch? We're struggling to get 3! Everywhere is on major back order!

[witch]

Not putting XP on - hes only getting the little ones and he is looking for cheap so wont buy XP anyway
No network availability where he wants them (well there is some wireless but it is as slow as anything)
Didn't know about the orders - thanks for that

[torledo]

The dep head has been playing with one of these and wants to buy a whole classes worth. We can't get them on the network so he is thinking of allowing one year group and one only to save to them and print directly. I am concerned about children changing the settings on them - is there anything else I should be flagging up?

i'd advise he hold fire until the 8.9inch screen model is available in the uk. My understanding is it will ship with xp home but the storage is till restricted to
4gb. i think asus will ship with a 4gb card to achieve the 8gb being promoted.

Unfortunately the changes are going to do nothing to help the abysmal battery life...my advise is to wait until they ditch the celeron M processor for intel's new menlow design. But then you'd have a very long wait and no guarantee asus will make that decision any time soon.

[Joanne]

tell him they would be useless without proper wireless connections which would cost £x and you may as well buy proper laptops for THAT price!! :P hehe.

[localzuk]

The problem you may have, with them being not for a specific child, is that it is easy to get a terminal up and edit anything they want.

You could try enabling multi-user mode, and then allowing access to the asus interface only. But that is a bit of a faff.

[torledo]

tell him they would be useless without proper wireless connections which would cost £x and you may as well buy proper laptops for THAT price!! :P hehe.

the wifi adapter in the eee is staggeringly good. The eee was consistently getting 30-40% increased signal strength compared to the intel a/g/n adapter in my thinkpad T61 when trying to detect a signal from the same location and same AP,

The eee was particularly good at picking up 802.11g signals travelling through brick walls. Miles better than any other laptop.

[CyberNerd]

The eee was particularly good at picking up 802.11g signals travelling through brick walls. Miles better than any other laptop.

I guess that accounts for the 3hr battery

[leco]

Or you could just say - "yea OK that'll be great." and wait for them all to fall over. Wait for them all to loose the pupil's work, wait until the teacher gets soooo frustrated - and then ask for some proper laptops

[FN-GM]

Tell him for them to work on the network he will need to buy a terminal server. If he does buy one the problem will be solved.

[torledo]

I guess that accounts for the 3hr battery

i'd be juming hoops if it could get anywhere near 3hrs even under light usage and wifi turned off. I'm guessing the celeron processor is what draws the life out of the batttery. The screen is LED i think, which in theory should help battey life. No CD-ROM, again good for the battery. That leaves wifi and the cpu....my thinkpad has a little utility that tells you what options will make the most of the battery - disabling the wifi adapater has virtually no impact on battery runtime in the thinkpad.

processor design is key when you're looking at the ultra-portable market.

[witch]

Thanks for all that: we have no money for 'real' laptops and to be honest, if you saw the state of the ones we have, you wouldn't want to buy them either.
This battery issue interests me though - is it the wifi or is it just not very good

[CyberNerd]

This battery issue interests me though - is it the wifi or is it just not very good

The battery life is reportedly only 3hrs, but TBH it's not been that bad for me, I've been on a 2hr car journey, the battery was on 60% yet lasted the whole journey watching a divx movie. On the plus side, the PSU is pretty standard and the batteries will likely be mass produced as clones due to the eeepc popularity in china.

[tech_guy]

I'm getting approx 2hrs on mine.

And the wireless is great. Rock solid.