Foreign Perspectives

I’ve been looking at the ASUS range for quite a while now but really couldn’t see the point of getting a baby computer with only at most 20GB storage. Sure, it would have sounded a lot a few years ago but when you start thinking about photos and videos it just doesn’t cut it these days and that’s before you even think about software.

All these little computers are tagged as “netbooks” meaning that they’re intended primarily for use as portable Internet browsers. Certainly for those with 8GB or less “disc” space you’d not get much in the way of applications loaded up but when you’ve 120GB of hard drive to play with what you’ve got is a smaller version of a laptop ie they can do pretty much everything that their bigger brothers can do.

Typically these small computers come loaded with a custom version of Linux although you can also get versions with XP and Vista loaded too (they’re usually £20 or so more expensive). The Linux versions usually come with OpenOffice (the Linux equivalent of Microsoft Office), photo and video display software and, of course, games. In other words, the software that most people use. Note that the Linux software is free you don’t get hit with the extra cost of buying MS Office that you would with the XP or Vista versions.

Out of the box the Aspire One seems like a closed system but it’s easy enough to open things up: just press Alt+F2, type xfce-setting-show and press enter, click on Desktop, then Behavior and finally Show desktop menu on right-click. Now, right-clicking on the desktop will give you the full range of options and in particular going to System, Add/Remove software will give you oodles of choices to extend the functionality of your system.

Incidently, don’t think that going down the Linux route will cut you off from the Microsoft world because there are emulation packages available that’ll let you run pretty much all XP/Vista based software.