I have jumped on the weensy net­book band­wagon and pur­chased an ASUS Eee PC 901. It is teensy and black and is run­ning a spare XP license I had left over from when I upgraded my now mas­sive by com­par­i­son lap­top to Vista. It is won­der­ful! It is quick, small, and lasts upwards of 8 hours on a charge. With the wire­less on, even! I’m using it pri­mar­ily for class — tak­ing notes and pulling up mate­ri­als on West­law and Lexis. I’m also using it for email and my cal­en­dar, cour­tesy of (get this!) Office 2007, which runs sur­pris­ingly smoothly on the tiny SSD hard drive. It took some tweak­ing to get every­thing run­ning smoothly, but once I got it all worked out, the Eee became absolutely per­fect. I’ve even got­ten used to its tiny key­board — to the point where typ­ing on my behe­moth is now a lit­tle uncomfortable.

All that said, I can­not rec­om­mend the Eee line of net­books to every­one. They have a funky hard drive sit­u­a­tion, with a tiny (4GB) main drive that has fast write speeds and a larger (16GB) data drive with much slower write speeds. The write speeds on the slow drive make cer­tain oper­a­tions tricky. XP often writes back to the drive, so XP and its pro­grams need to be on the faster drive in order to work smoothly. This lim­its what you can do with the Eee. If you really know XP and know how to do it, you can shrink your Win­dows instal­la­tion and move installer caches off to the data drive so you have plenty of space, but it takes work. I have no idea whether the XP ver­sion of the 901 comes with these sorts of mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the oper­at­ing sys­tem. The ver­sion I bought came with a dumbed-​​down Linux dis­tro that was absolutely use­less for what I wanted to do with the machine. I researched the machine’s lim­i­ta­tions and knew what I was get­ting into before buy­ing. I rec­om­mend that any­one inter­ested in get­ting an Eee (or any net­book for that mat­ter) to do the same.

Any­way. I also got a Sony Reader a while ago. I wanted an e-​​paper device for read­ing my law case­books, which, through an arrange­ment with the pub­lish­ers, I have made a prac­tice of scan­ning for use on my lap­top since start­ing law school. I was torn between the Kin­dle and the Reader, and finally decided on the Reader for two main rea­sons: 1) I did not need the Kindle’s wire­less fea­ture, and 2) the Sony Reader is made of metal, rather than the Kindle’s plas­tic. The Reader was also $100 less than the Kin­dle at the time.

And I also love my Reader. I have not actu­ally pur­chased any books for it from Sony’s e-​​book store, which has a lim­ited selec­tion, but I have man­aged to use my text­books on it with great suc­cess. Sony recently pushed a firmware update for the Reader which greatly improved PDF han­dling and adds com­pat­i­bil­ity for the emerg­ing, ISO-​​standard-​​aspiring IDPF .epub for­mat. There are lots of stores out there on the Inter­nets that sell .epub for­mat books.

So now for school I have my Eee PC 901 and my Sony Reader. Both of which are pos­i­tively lil­liput­ian and fit into a tiny bag. No more big heavy back­pack for me!