I had a look at the EEE PC at the weekend, it looks kind of cool and weighs virtually nothing…

I know, I know, I know – it was designed for the younger market, but this laptop has infinite appeal for almost any IT professional, at sub 1kg with a solid state disk?

I quite liked the OS that was installed, but a friend suggested installing XP on it (and upping the disk to 4GB or buying a 4GB version) as then it will support everything XP supports, which means I can plug my phone in as a USB 3G modem – that’s the key thing. I could feasibly get away with this being what I take on holiday (sorry Em – no DVD’s anymore?!).

What are peoples thoughts, does anyone have one?

Some notes on websites I’ve found with info that may be considered useful going forward:

• Tnkgrl mods the Asus to have internal Bluetooth
• Ivancover’s guide to a variety of Asus upgrades (Bluetooth, USB, GPS, Flash etc).
• I found the PC Advisor review interesting, and agree with the weakness that it doesn’t have an internal modem just a phone socket, so I’d need to get a USB link to my phone working – under XP or the Linux built in OS. Tracey and Matt appear to have had the same concern, and found JKKMobile’s review of inserting a 3G modem, I think I’d be happier just knowing if it would support my HTC Trinity out of the box with the Linux OS, or whether I’d really need to install XP.

I was interested to read on The Register in the comments section:

Asus tells me the 3G upgrade’s coming by the end of the year and that it’ll be offered on its own, as an upgrade technical users can perform themselves.

There’s no word on price yet.

Anyone waiting the 8GB model isn’t likely to see one before the new year – Asus’ Eee PC production is current focused entirely on the 2GB and 4GB models, I’m told.

The other colours – pink, green and blue – will be coming in 2008 too.

Although an expansys thread suggest a utility I hadn’t heard of before , WMWifiRouter, which appears to work in WM6 and WM5 AKU 3.3 – looks like my WM5 has AKU 3.0. I installed the trial software and it ran, but wouldn’t work – I’ll try again later with some support advice they’ve given me!