I make no bones about the fact that I'm an enthusiastic Mac user. Putting aside any aesthetic preferences that are largely subjective when I bought my first Mac i was up and running within about 30 minutes - and that included installing Microsoft Office. These days, my main work systems are a 20" iMac and the MacBook Pro.

What I've found is that my working needs have changed and the MacBook Pro is total overkill. It's got a 160GB hard disk and 4GB of RAM and all I really do with it is collect email, read RSS feeds, browse the Internet a little and type articles (and for that I use a text editor - no need for anything as sophisticated as a word processor like Word). I've been running an Eee PC (the 9" model with XP) for the last few days and it's now replaced the MacBook Pro as my travelling companion.

I'm using GMail (set up to collect POP email for me) rather than a mail client so that I don't have to set up anything on the Eee PC. It also means that if the machine is lost or stolen that my email won't be laid bare to the lucky finder/thief. The WiFi is good enough for browsing and email and the screen on the 9" Eee PC is surprisingly good. Given the price of the Eee PC, I was expecting something lower in quality but that's not the case in my view.

Windows XP is OK. I've turned off all the visual enhancement stuff like wallpaper, the funkier looking Start button and Taskbar so that I can eek out as much performance as possible. My only complaint about the Windows XP installation is that the default set up has the storage divided into two partitions with the OS getting 4GB. About one-third of that is free when you start the Eee PC and installing a couple of extra apps kills that pretty quickly. You'll nee to make sure apps get installed to the second partition as that's got far more available space.

What I'm really lacking is a decent calendar solution but I'm hoping that MobileMe will solve that. I use iCal on the iMac and publish a couple of calendars so that my wife knows where I am and so that we have a single view of family activities. Using MobileMe while online will resolve that - I hope.

My Hydrapinion colleague David Hague bought a cheap Compaq laptop yesterday for about $350 but I don't think that's a solution for me. What I like about the Eee PC is its small size. If I wanted a larger laptop I'd get one.

Now, if only Apple got into the small form factor laptop game and made something the size of the Eee PC that's as thin as the MacBook Air...