Posting this while on a boat. Somewhere off the coast of Singapore. Using WiMAX. Pix later if I can.

Now this is the definition of surfing, in more ways than one.

Meet George. My Asus Eee PC 701. Yes, I have a weird tendency of naming inanimate objects. See, George came with XP but I decided to be a little hardcore and go the Linux way, yo.

Bad idea.

I tried the Asus Eee PC custom version of Xubuntu. And though it worked fine for the most part, it had some weird quirks. Like insisting my battery was broken and being picky about what Wi-Fi networks it would connect to. Fairly annoying, and though I knew those little bugs would be fixable if I could locate an Internet connection for me to download instructions from, I didn’t have the time. No.

Though I love the idea of Linux, and Xubuntu is, in many ways, a lovely OS to use, I can’t be grokking the thing everytime. I want something that works out of the box, and if it doesn’t, I want to be able to know how to fix it.

Well, I grew up with Windows. From 3.1, to 95 to 98 to XP to 2000, NT Server Win2k Server and now Vista, I’ve grown wise to the way of the Windoze. Yes, my Open Source cred is going to go down 1,000 points but using Windows has gotten just so intuitive that Linux’s many hoops just isn’t attractive.

So I reinstalled XP from Asus’s handy image restore disk. Then I took a ginsu knife to it. I removed all the apps I could get away with – MS Works, Adobe PDF Reader, SQL, Windows Live (except for Writer and Messenger), threw out the Help files, extraneous .TXT files and compressed the friggin’ drive. Not to mention a random few bits here and there

I now have 2GB free on my Asus Eee PC on a 4GB hard disk. Go me. I also run the Portable Apps Suite (light) from my Kingston 4GB drive so I can bring my documents everywhere. It even has a Portable version of The Gimp so you can do without Photoshop.

For a more comprehensive guide on cutting out the fat from XP, try reading Bold Fortune’s guide here. Be warned, though, it’s not an easy slog but if you’ve got the time and tenacity to go through all the threads, you’ll get quite the education on XP’s innards.

And if you make a PDF version and email it to me, I might possibly agree to have your babies.

So, George is now lean and mean. He’s just missing one thing – a sizable SD card for me to store data on. That will have to wait till the next PC Fair, and hopefully 16GB SD cards can be had without me needing to sell off a spare kidney.

News of the iPhone 3G’s imminent coming isn’t really new, especially in the Asia Pacific region. For Singapore, at least, it’s already come out in the open that SingTel will be the one bringing around some iPhone loving.

Cue newspaper ad below. More than likely an in-your-face statement aimed at competitors StarHub and M1.

Very classy, SingTel. Really.

What you see in the picture below is my HP 2133 Mini Note sitting on my lap, while on the Aeroline bus back to Singapore from Kuala Lumpur, where me and the wife spent the long weekend break over the Vesak holiday.

Seeing as i’d taken the bus both to and fro, going about six hours in each direction, I figured that the trip would be a good opportunity to road test the HP 2133 Mini Note. While I won’t go into a thorough review pending a couple of other things I need to do to the Mini Note first, here are some quick thoughts on how my first weekend with the Mini Note went.

• If on a bus, car or any other type of moving transportation where there’s a lot of bumpiness involved, the Mini Note’s built-in HDD protection kicks in quite often, making any constant disk access a real pain in the ass. On the bus, watching videos was near impossible, as the HDD protection made it almost impossible to stream data properly, making for a load of dropped frames accompanied by eerily smooth audio. The only solution around that was to watch videos stored on flash media i.e. SD card or USB.
• Battery life with the bundled 3-cell battery is in one word: short-ass-horrible. I managed about two and a half episodes of Boston Legal before the notebook went dead, though admittedly, this was on the High Performance power plan, and with screen brightness on maximum. I do suppose that more minutes could have been squeezed out with a dimmer display and a more optimized power plan.
• WIndows Vista on the Mini Note is horrible, even with 2GB of RAM. And this is even after multiple OS tweaks and with a number of disabled services. Even playing Solitaire is an exercise in lagginess. I’m going to try shoving Windows XP on the Mini Note in a day or two, hope things are much better then.
• The keyboard is a godsend. Especially for fat-fingered people. Like me.
• The LCD is excellent; bright and sharp, and surprisingly good even at diminished brightness settings. The only nitpick I have is with the glossy coating. When will notebook manufacturers learn that glossy displays only look good, but are a pain to maintain and to look at?
• The Mini Note is not getting any lap action from me anytime soon, not unless there’s a layer of protection involved. Despite the ’slower’ 1.2GHz CPU on my unit (with 1.6GHz being the fastest you can buy), the Mini Note still gets more than a little toasty. Exact numbers will have to wait till I can borrow that nifty laser temperature reader thingamajig from my colleague.

What about you? If you own a Mini Note, how’s your experience been like so far?

So the HP 2133 Mini-Note finally made its official launch on the shores of Singapore, enabling me to finally get my grubby hands on the journo discount unit i’d ordered almost three weeks ago.

Oh. Yeah. Baby. Read on for the rest of the unboxing picture set.

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