Not Working in the Cloud with my Eee 900

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed, or hopefully my FriendFeed account, will be aware that the white Asus Eee 900 XP I ordered from Amazon arrived at home yesterday. My wife, who is responsible for naming all computers in the house immediately named this one Vanilla Shake.

Now most people think of the Asus notebooks as “netbooks”, primarily suited for working with Web applications like Google Docs, i.e., working in the Internet cloud. Now this was probably true for the early eee PCs, given their limited RAM and especially their limited Solid State Disk (SSD) resources, but with the 900 model I’m not so sure. In fact, over the upcoming days and weeks I plan on running a little experiment with Vanilla Shake to see if I can’t get it set up as a full-blown production PC for my computer consulting work. This effort will be kind of the opposite of my buddy Kevin Tofel’s current experiment on trying to work exclusively in the cloud for a month.

So, I plan on attempting to install Office 2003, Visio 2003, Microsoft Project 2007, and even iTunes on little Vanilla Shake. This effort will be helped greatly by the fact that I also ordered a 16GB SDHC card with my 900. So the total SSD space I have on the unit is 28GB. Not huge compared with the 100GB I have on my current work PC, a Kohjinsha SH6 UMPC, but not that bad either. It wasn’t that many years ago that my work PC was a Sony U750P with only a 20GB disk drive, and that ran a comparable suite of software, In fact, the main reason I replaced it was not disk space, but rather the lowly 512MB of RAM that was the maximum amount possible in the unit. My new Asus Eee 900 has 1GB of RAM.

One thing about Vanilla Shake that complicates this experiment is the rather odd configuration of SSD on the unit. The 28GB is actually broken into three drives: C: with 4GB of SSD, D: with 8GB of SSD, and the 16GB of my SDHC card. As shipped, about half of the C: drive is occupied, and about 2GB of the D: drive is also occupied. Their are actually two Program Files folders – one on C: and one on D:. XP was configured with C: as the default Program Files and My Documents drive. One of the very first things I’ve done is to change the default Program Files drive to the larger D: drive and to move the My Documents directory onto the SDHC E: drive. That immediately gave me much more room to play with.

So, if you’re interested in this diabolical experiment, stay tuned to this blog and to the Eee XP PC room I created on FriendFeed. See if the little $550 PC can replace a $1400+ UMPC! Which one will you be rooting for?