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Right off the bat with the eeePC's Xandros OS I was having issues. Sure, they were minor, but for a techno-geek like myself it was an opportunity. On the first night I had the unit it wouldn't connect to my Linksys WAP54G wireless acess point using WPA so I had to downgrade to WEP and in the next few days I discovered that the audio volume was too quiet for listening on an airplane. Not to mention the limited UI and the promise of some new Linux tinkering, something had to be done. The only other EeePC I'd seen was running Windows and while XP does everything I need it to, that didn't sit right with me. 

After looking about at portable DVD players, iPods and such I came back to a device that I saw at a 1-year old's birthday party a while back.  There were three of us IT-geek dad's there and we were going back and forth about cool software, gadgets and such when one of the guys pulled out his Eee PC.  Cool.  If you haven't seen these before it's like a laptop but sized for only one leg, not two.  It would be perfect for staying connected while away from home because it's got built-in wireless and is a fully functional, although somewhat low-spec laptop. 

Once you start looking at them, there's four hardware levels to choose from.  There's a 2G Surf, a 4G Surf, a 4G Super Mobile and the 8G Super Mobile.  Canadian prices range from $300 for the 2G, $350 for the 4G Surf, $400 for the 4G Super Mobile and $500 for the 8G.   The 2G's and 4G's are shipped with 512 MBs RAM which again by today's standards is pretty slim but it is upgradable on the 4G  The 8G comes with 1 Gig of memory.  On the 2G the RAM is soldered to the motherboard so I would avoid that model right there.  To conserve power these little units make use of a Solid State Disk (SSD) instead of the conventional spinning platter type hard drive.  It's very similar to the flash drives that are so common these days but with a different interface and faster read/write speeds.  Since SSD's are still very new to the market they're very expensive and the ones found in the EeePc are quite small by today's standards coming in at 2 Gig, 4 Gig or 8 Gig in only the top level Eee PC. The 4G model comes in two levels, the Surf and the Super Mobile.  The Surf is $50 cheaper and comes with a slightly smaller battery and without the webcam and carry case.