Asus Eee PC?

Anyone bought one of these little guys?

I was thinking of getting one just for portability (8g model), but, im thinking could this thing handle some basic midi sequencing? (Obviously its small SSD would be usless for direct to disk recording)

Its small enough to be purched on the right end of my Waldorf Q. If I could somehow get Reason going on this thing, it would be a great little scratch pad as well.

Has anyone used one for sequencing?

If you were triggering external keys/modules, it might work ok. Reviews on it say it's slow, so I'd take that into consideration when running apps that need a steady clock/cpu access.

I've got one just so I could have connectivity on the road without hauling my expensive-to-replace laptop around. It has Firefox and Thunderbird preinstalled as well as Openoffice and a few other apps.

I doubt it would be too hot as a DAW: The throughput on the solid state hard drive is kind of slowish...and if you install WindowsXP on it, there's not a lot of room left. If you're only recording MIDI, that might be fine.

You could give Audacity or Ardour a shot though without having to uninstall Linux...though a lightweight package like Reaper might be better.

Another thing to consider is the LCD's native resolution is 800x480 (though the Desktop can be 800x600)...some DAWs need a higher rez interface.

I used one the other day, a client bought one in, it had 2gb ram + nlited XP Pro. I was impressed how much it offered for such a low price, with quite generous specs. It seemed to run quite fast.

I see theres talk of a version with a bigger screen + higher resolution. It might be worth waiting for, but i want one now.

Being able to play 'Elite' and browsing HC KSS on such a small device will all be tremendous fun.

It a blast right out of the box. There are a ton of hacks for it online. The built in Linux distro is actually very good if tou turn off "simple mode"...

Shame there's no modem onboard - the outlet is blanked off and the card is missing from inside. The later units even have the modem functionality removed from the Bios. Okay if you can always get a wireless or wired network connection.

USB modem is a solution. How many folks would still find dial-up useful? Every place I've stayed in the world in the last five years always had ethernet or wireless...even remote spots in the Yucatan.

you can get 2gb RAM?

i thought the max was a gig...

anyways, i was gonna buy one, but mis padres are gonna get me one for college, so i bought an old ibm so i could run some music programs

also, flash memory is going wayyyy down in prices, so by december hopefully they'll have a 16 or 32 offered

also, they're coming out with an 8-inch version

I pposted this elsewhere, but anyway:

I'm using Cubase Portable v4 on the eee and it only consumes 24mb ram (of the 512 supplied) and it's pretty fast.

I gave up on the various linux options due to the various temperamental wireless issues. Linux is awesome for music and latency but it just doesn't have all the features at hand without more than a few minutes of googling.

I managed to install windows into 250mb disk space and used only portable versions of applications so that the full install size was little over 800mb. This also enables me to easily remove programs onto a thumbdrive if and when i need the space and don't have to worry about messing up installations.

I now have 3 Gb available to mess around with, which is plenty for my use when I have a thumbdrive handy. You can just get SD cards for expansion.

The cut down XP I am using boots in about 20 seconds to desktop - like all the linux distros I tried, except for the original xandros linux OS, which boots in about 4. It has never crashed or BSOD'd with windows on it.

I recently tested mixing 16 mono tracks, a reverb and an eq in Cubase Portable and it didn't seem to mind at all. The onboard flash SSD disk drive is well known for being as fast as normal desktop hard disks.

The sound from the headphone jack is actually really good. The speakers in the screen are like most laptop speakers, "NOT DAW worthy", but still useable.

The screen's small size is slightly annoying on the 701, you sometimes have to hide the taskbar to press an OK button, but the 900 will be larger.

In my opinion, this is faster than a pc I cut my teeth on over a decade ago,and I thought that was fast and functional then for running pretty much the same applications i do now.

Has anyone else been doing stuff on the eee?

What wireless issues? (I'm a Linux guy ... just curious -- wireless out of the box on that thing works great, at least with WEP... I'm not sure if NetworkManager was available to do WPA).

Anyhow, a friend has one -- and I would suggest waiting for the larger screen model if you want to do anything significant with it. I believe it's still going to be the same tiny resolution but the existing display is kind of small. That being said, it's size is crazy awesome for portability -- a bit pricey for what you get though, and a bit limited to use for anything serious.