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The little beauty continues to be snatched at the earliest opportunity at home. The beauty of these netbooks is that they are so portable and light you almost forget that you’re using one.

The trouble with mine is that the sod just doesn’t want to start up sometimes and so back to PC it must go. I contacted their customer support during the week who said they’d get back to me in 5 working days. Sorry did I say customer support. Not a good start!

Checking through a few forums might have highlighted a bios problem so I’ll be interested to see what they come up with. Hopefully it’ll be a quick fix and I’ll be on my way. Just have to wait and see!

After looking around for several months i visited my not so local PC world. Took one look at the Asus eeePC 901 and a returned 4211 and it was immediately obvious. The MSI wind-u-like advent had a better look and feel to it and so I ordered one. Fast forward 3 days and it was siting at home through PC World’s online shopping

Unfortunately it has come with the Tech Guy’s back up utility on it which doesn’t always let the little monkey turn on. up pops the advent splash screen and then a little clunk can be heard at it turns itself off. Try it a couple of times and it can do it again or turn itself on. I think that I’ll mention it to PC World tomorrow to see if it’s a known issue. More on that later, I’m sure.

Apart from that really small problem the keyboard is ace for short amount of typing, you just have to be more accurate when aiming for keys. The screen is great and the processor is speedy enough for most things. Video playback is spot on as well, what more could you ask for?

The 3rd June has only just begun for us Europeans and already there was a deluge of reviews and dogy trade stand / hotel room type photo’s of new netbooks. The spec lists and comparisons are all coming out as well and before long I’ll have to commit to one.

Top 3 are still the eeepc 901, msi wind and acer one. All of them are about the same for my purposes. I have some network storage so don’t need a large hard disk but I do need a good screen and good battery life.

The other problem is windows or linux? Whilst I’m staying with Ubuntu for the duration with the desktop, I’m not able to use Ham Radio Deluxe with linux or log onto our corporate server so I may have to by the linux version as they tend to have the better specs and install XP from my currently redundant disc’s.

It’s unlikely that the rest of the day will pass without more news on the tech sites. So I’ll be keeping google reader open and running

This week should see the opening up of the netbook race with Computex being held on the 3rd-7th June. It’ll be an interesting week and no doubt a few of the big hitters will be putting their products where there mouths are. I’ll be keeping a tight hand on my wallet for a couple of weeks after the event until the reviews start to flood in then I think it’ll be time to pounce.

Front runner at the moment is the MSI wind although now that Dell and Acer seem to be having a go it’ll be interesting to see if ASUS start to drop their prices now that there are so many that compete on a very level and highly competetive playing field.

Just goes to show that the manufacturers are still a bit behind in what the markey actually wants to have as they’ve all missed the boat so far.