eee pc

Well, I have had my new little baby computer for a few days. I love it, it is small lightweight and fully functional as a laptop for just about everything. I can even touch type on the keyboard almost normally and I think the more I use it the easier it will be.

I have been experimenting with different software to try and find the ones that run best on the lower power processor. Video and music are particularly important to me and I would like to be able to watch a movie properly especially when I am stuck on an airplane or airport.

I have tried winamp, itunes, quicktime and VLC media player.

For movies you cant go past VLC, a few reasons:

* It will play just about any movie format without fuss and the need to run off and find a plugin

* It is a reasonably small file that operates without stuttering the image during a movie

* Simple as, this is also a disadvantage see audio below.

winamp would play avi's or mp4 on the screen probably just getting the right plugins but I couldn't find them after 1/2 an hours of stuffing around. Same problem with quicktime. iTunes seemed to be too memory intensive to run movies without stuttering so while the sound was crystal clear the picture looked like I was only getting every 4th or 5th frame. Other problem with itunes was that it only played mp4's and even though avi's are native to mac it doesn't play them.

So, VLC is my movie player of choice BUT it is crap for audio, not that the sound is bad or anything, I just love the iTunes interface for music, playlists albums etc. So I have loaded both and will use the most appropriate, thankfully I still have about 100gb of space after loading software, movies and music.

I am also going to experiment with eBooks on this trip and have downloaded MS Reader for this, I'm not sure about the whole eBook thing so we'll leave this as a TBC. I have loaded a cool little program called eeeRotate which allows you to use the computer in portrait mode.

I have also gone with OpenOffice and deleted the free trial version of MS Office so I can edit all my TD documentation on my epc without MS's help.

The major software change I have done is installing Google Chrome and hiding IE, however I haven't deleted IE as it is used as the backbone for other software so I am reluctant to do an uninstall but I have hidden it so it basically cant be used.

Only 13 more sleeps til I head off to Tallahassee and I am really looking forward to it. I just hope it stops raining and warms up a bit.