The Asus eeePC 4G is more than capable of acting as a main computer for individuals that need to stick with something cheap, and don’t have a large need for super intense applications.

That opening sentence describes the experience I had using the eeePC 4G with Windows XP installed as the operating system over the course of 4 days. The minor details I haven’t mentioned yet was that after the first day I installed a USB mouse to make my navigation a little easier. The little touch pad is okay when you’re on the go, but if you’re sitting down at home the last thing you want to do is keep leaning forward to try and use a miniture touch pad that doesn’t always respond. I’m also using a Class 6 8GB SDHC card as a place to store temporary internet files, program files, and the my documents storage location.

As this device is a single core processor clocked at 633mhz stock, I decided to make use of the utility called eeectl that can overclock the processor to what speed it was originally designed for–900mhz. The utility works perfectly without problems, and even gives the user control over the fan & backlighting. There is also a icon that is placed in the system tray near the clock that displays how much of the processor they are clocked at (0-100%), and a tempature is also displayed in the icon animation. On those facts alone this makes eeectl a must have application for the laptop.

The laptop I was using still has the default of 512mb of RAM installed. This should be sufficent for most regular computer users, but as soon as I can it will be upgraded to 2GB for maximum performance. The last time I checked, amazon.com has the price around $51 with a $20 rebate available on the RAM module. Quite a bargin if you ask me!

I wanted to test out an intense application to see how the handling was, and used SecondLife as the test. Surprisingly, the intense network and graphics usage held up like a champ, but were a little choppy at times. The reasons for that would be the video memory, processor, and total ram available. I’m pretty sure that the performance would be great with the 2GB ram module installed, and will further test this out.

Here’s a list of some applications I tested out that worked perfectly like they would on a normal laptop or desktop PC:

• Windows Movie Maker (also used the onboard camera as the capture source)
• Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2
• Skype
• Windows Live
• Windows Media Player 11 (used with media files and also NetFlix.com instant play movies)
• Internet Explorer 6 & 7
• Sandboxie (use this in combination with your browser to prevent spyware or worms–or any rouge applications you might want to run but are not that sure about)

The list really could go on and on. This little guy is capable of competing with the performance of other machines out there! If I would have found my Visual Studio 2005 installation disc I would have gave that a test run too. Although, with that tiny screen I’d have to make extensive use of the pins to hide the toolbars.

Before ending this post I’ll further talk about not using an anti-virus application. There maybe some users that will swear by using them religiously because of the whole mess of things that can attack your pc in numerous ways. These suggestions and information is based off my own experience, so take from it what you will.

Using an anti-virus causes lots of extra activity on the hard drive and in memory that would take a performance hit out of the eeePC that isn’t necessary. By understanding that most systems of today are infected by running rouge applications downloaded through peer-to-peer programs, and web surfing websites that contain ads that exploit your pc to run their spyware, you can use this knowledge to provide a slightly better solution to avoid using the anti-virus apps.

The major application for my demonstration today will be Sandboxie, by using this application you can run your browser in a controlled environment to prevent any nasty bugs from taking over your system, and also provide an outlet to testing applications or toolbars out before you install them. Sandboxie is extremely customizable, and let’s you explore the contents of what the application you’re running in the sandbox created. It has a number of functions, and it’s all for free! This solution alone can keep even clueless web surfers away from nasty malware found on sites like myspace.

If for some reason you end up with malware on your pc, use a program like IceSword to delete the rouge BHO (browser help objects) & startup references that are in your system. There are times when the malware will rewrite those references after you delete them, which will cause you go one more step further with technical know-how to remove them. This simply involves booting up a Hiren’s CD and using the NTFS drivers navigate to the folder and deleting the rouge DLL & EXE file names you found in the IceSword BHO and startup listings.

Hopefully, this gives you a nice starting overview of the eeePC and what it’s capable of. If you have further questions, comments, or would like to know more about a certain feature or function of the eeePC leave a comment.