It works ok as an ereader, but not as well as epaper. What else can I do with it? I wanted to use it for browsing the web. I am used to Firefox, so the first step was to download and install that. Quick and painless. Then I wanted to move across my custom-written html home page from my iMac. I noticed a bluetooth icon on the tray at the bottom right. I click it. Long delay, followed by a bluetooth not found message. I notice a bluetooth icon on the desktop, so I click that. Same thing. So I browse the web on my desktop for some 1000HE specs. Yes, they all say it has bluetooth. Hmmm.
Eventually, I realise that you have to click the extreme right item in the tray: Eeepc Tray Utility. That allows you to change the screen resolution and also enable/disable Bluetooth, WLAN and Camera. Having enabled Bluetooth there, I manage the file transfer fairly easily.
It is at this point that I realise that a screen height of 600px is really short. To give you an idea, it requires careful adjustment of the scroll to see the whole of a typical ElectricPig header, ie the heading, pic and 8 lines of text that you see initially before you click “Continue Reading”. This does not make for convenient browsing.
Part of the problem, I realize, is that I am making heavy weather of the touch pad. Old timers like me were brought up on the rtfm mantra – read the f****** manual. But, of course, that is one of the reasons Open Source software took so long to take off. The vast majority of people have no interest in reading the manual. Indeed even those who are fairly technically literate concluded when staring at thousand page Microsoft manuals in the 1980s and 1990s that decent software should be written so that it does not need such nonsense. Careful adherence to standards, for example, can render most manual pages redundant.
But one must be pragmatic, so with some irritation I open the Manual. To be fair, it turns out there was another way of turning on Bluetooth (hitting Fn-F2 twice). There are three pages on the TouchPad. Tapping and double-tapping I knew about, but two-finger zooming and two-finger scrolling were new to me. 80% of the problem seems to be lack of practice, but there also seems to be a 20% doesn’t work problem. The fact is that tapping with the cursor over a close button sometimes fails to close, and you have to click the “button” below the TouchPad.
Still, at this point I have a functioning browser. The desktop has a Skype icon which is good. So I log in and phone a friend. On my desktop iMac I use a fairly fancy Plantronics headset, but carrying that kind of kit around with a netbook is a nuisance, so I try out the built-in mike and speakers. The mike claims to be fairly fancy: “the built-in array microphone is more clear and echo-free compared with traditional single microphones and can be used for video conferencing, voice narrations, audio recordings, and multimedia applications”.
That seems to be typical marketing-speak translated by someone with little understanding of English grammar. Looking at the hardware, I figure out it means there are two typical netbook mikes three inches apart, just under the screen, rather than the usual one. My friend reports the sound is fairly good, but with more background noise than normal. So Skype works.
I always download email onto my hard-drive, so I do not particularly want to tangle with using the netbook for email. If I need to send one I can log into a webmail account from the browser.
There are also icons for Adobe Reader and Star Office. Star Office is a version of OpenOffice which is my normal word processor/spreadsheet etc. But I use a text editor far more than OpenOffice. My preferred editor is Mac only, so I spend a little time browsing around for a free Windows editor and settle on Notepad++. I also experiment with Stanza to see if it is better for reading long pdfs than Adobe Reader. It seems to behave differently from the Mac version and it will take me a little while to figure out why.
“My Computer” brings back nightmarish memories. The wretched thing is almost useless for browsing files. The first problem is that it defaults to showing only a selection of files, without extensions and with no details. If you change it, the change only applies to that particular directory. Infuriating. All I can remember is that the solution was not obvious, so I phone an XP expert who takes me through the process of using Explorer, changing the defaults etc, whilst telling me that he uses a proprietary programme because Explorer is so hopeless. Certainly it does not begin to compare with the Leopard Finder on the Mac. But be positive, I now have a usable file browser.
Oh, I should have mentioned in my first blog entry that whereas the EeePC 900 has a fairly small semiconductor memory (8GB, but there are various sizes), the 1000HE has a proper 160GB hard drive, so it is not short of disk space.
