Ever since Nick Negroponte came up with the OLPC, there were a lot of competitors trying to gun for that market. Intel tried to come up with the Classmate PC, but did not turn out well. Even Nick’s OLPC itself was not as well received as all the hype before the launch. The only one that stands out of the bunch was the Asus EeePC.
Designed to be a low cost laptop, it comes with a 7”LCD and enough computing power to run Windows XP. Originally Asus preloaded the EeePC with Linux, but due to popular demand, they now have Windows XP flavors as well. There are also couple of different configurations for the EeePC, but each come standard with an Intel CPU and chipset, Ethernet, WiFi, SSD (solid state drive) harddisk (ranging from 2GB for the entry level one and up to 8GB for the high end ones), a media card reader and a built in camera with a mic. My only gripe with it is that Asus decided to underclock the CPUs in the EeePCs. As battery life strongly depends on the CPU, the Intel Celeron 900MHz CPUs that power the EeePCs were clocked to around 500Mhz to save on battery. Thankfully, there are now BIOS replacements (unofficial) and Linux/windows applications that allow you to overclock your EeePC to unleash its full potential.
