I have had a never ending quest to find a decent portable computer for as long as I can remember. The closest two have been an original Tandy Model 100 that was and is still perfect for typing stories on the go using its full sized keyboard, 8 line LCD and 32K RAM powered by a couple of “AA” batteries. Second best – it was more flexible but had a tiny keyboard – was a hybrid portable out of Korea or something called a RacePen that had the original DOS MS Works in ROM.

But now, at last, my dreams have been answered. I do have a full size laptop, but on a plane trip two weeks ago, I discovered that while if no-one is sitting next to you, its fine to use, the second someone is in the middle seat (I prefer aisle seats), there just isn’t the elbow room. After two attempts, I gave up.

This prompted me to ask around my peers what they used, and a smattering of different brands all came back – Acer, Mac, IBM, HP, Toshiba etc – with the standard theme being a 12” screen. There was one lone voice however that whispered “Asus Eee PC”.

I had heard of the Eee PC of course – there has been much ballyhoo about it as a cut down PC for students. But I had never seen one let alone used one, and in truth, had no interest as a real computer has to have a hard disk, at least a 12” screen, full size keyboard, wireless, networking etc etc.

The Asus Eee PC. It comes in white, black, pink, green or blue.

On my next trip into town, I did a quick detour via Office Works, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith and Retravision. None of them had any 12” screen laptops, they were all 14” and seemed to cost more than I wanted to pay. The closest was an Acer at a shade under a grand. But next to it was an Asus Eee PC. The salesperson knew nothing about it (quelle surprise) so I came home and did some homework.

The computer whisperer was right; the Eee PC could just be one of the computing world’s best kept secrets and make Asus a bucket load of money in the process.

You see it does have everything I needed. It’s only a 7” screen, but I have learned to live with that, and the keyboard is half size and I’ve grown used to that too. Everything else is there (barring the hard drive), but the flash memory is adequate for my needs, and if necessary and I need more, I just plug in one of the new 16GB thumb drives I got sent from Transcend. As my motor sport photographer mate Rossco tells me, that is more on a stick that he had in his laptop 3 years ago!

So networking, wireless, it plays video, has a built in camera and mic, all the applications you will (mostly) ever need via OpenOffice and a shedload more to boot, 10 second startup, external video port, SD card reader, USB ports ....what more can you need? At $488 it's a bargain!