ASUS eeePC and astrophotography...a fairly good possibility

[joshman]

hey guys, after seeing one of these beauties demonstrated at cambroon in feb, i went and picked one up. this thing despite it lack of obvious power and specs, is amazingly versatile and reasonably powerful for what it's worth. i've managed to get windows xp up and running on it, so i'm going through and installing on some various astro software and camera control software. i might actually be able to produce some reasonably clear photos this time!!!

anyway, hopefully this has peaked sem interest in this little beast, and i'll write some more tomorrow after work. maybe even with some pictures :D

[Dennis]

Good stuff Josh - thanks for the review and report. Look forward to the results.

Cheers

Dennis

[joshman]

ok, well due to a mix up at work(that's a complete saga in itself) i'm having today off, so here it is:

the ASUS EeePC.

this nifty little beast boasts a 900mhz Intel Celeron M processor, underclocked at 630mhz. which is easy enough to fix with software. it has a 4gb solid state drive with 512mb of ram (user upgradeable with DDR II 667mhz 200pin laptop memory), and in intel graphic driver. It has a built in SD card read as well as 3 external usb ports, and several internal ones from which various internal devices are run. it has a VGA webcam at the top of the screen, built in stereo speakers as well as built in microphone. onboard Wi-Fi card and ethernet make it easy to connect to wireless and cabled networks. it also has onboard headphone and microphone ports. while the screen is only 800x480 in resolution there exists the option in the windows drivers to use a scrolling 800x600 resolution, which works rather well, though it can get annoying at times.

apparently it weighs in at under 1kg, not having put this on the scales myself, i can't report as to the accuracy of this, or whether this is with or without the battery. battery life seems a little short, at about 3 hours with standard use (emails, the like). the best part about this thing is that it's small. very very small. which makes it perfect for travel.

software wise, it comes with a purpose built version of the Xandros linux distro, which is most useful if you're not inquisitive and only want it for what you given, it comes with openoffice.org, thunderbird mail client and firefox already installed, as well as a host of other open source freeware. i personally wasn't too happy with this, considering some of the uses i wanted to put this little lappy to, so i got rid of the linux distro and put windows xp on, which is not as big an ordeal as you would think, given that there is no optical drive, there are some great communities out there devoted to this little thing, and therefore some fantastic tutorials.

given that the internal drive is only 4gb, some optimisation of the installed software was done to maximize available disk space. there are fantastic tutorials out there to cut down on the bloat ware and install size of an xp install, and using portable apps (http://www.portableapps.com) is a great way of also cutting down install size. the other thing which i'm going to invest in is getting more ram for this beast, i have disabled the pagefile to save disk space (about 1.5x installed ram, so 768mb on stock hardware), which i have foind can cause a few out of memory errors, though only when doing 'large' tasks, like maxDSLR.


i would be greatly interested to see how this performs with autoguiding software.

i suppose you are all wanting to know the real issue though, how does it perform on games? well, quake3 runs flawlessly, as does dungeon siege (a few momentary pauses as it fetches data, which i put down to having to read from a usb hdd), i imagine that the original half-life would also run well. there are reports, and youtube videos, of it running STALKER, HL2, HALO, though not at any playable level, but the processing power is there. so this little lappy is by no means a kids machine, it can still attempt to play with the big boys.

and all this for $500 and some elbow grease :D

i'll be happy to answer questions, if i know the answer, so ask away and we'll see!

[mrsnipey]

Hi Joshman,
Are you able to get Stellarium working on it?
Would be very handy not having to lug my laptop/brick out every night.

[joshman]

yup, stellarium works, not at fantastic frames, but enough to know what you're looking at.

if you're getting one, i reckon it's worth going down the windows road with it. it'll simplify your life to no end, unless you're some kind of linux mage.