immediately

Well, you have been telling the whole world you want one for months now, so I am not sure how immediate really.....

I know I know.  But the thing is, everything can be right about a gadget, except, you know, it.

This particular it is going to sell like mad.  Just you watch.  In fact according to the guy in the shop, it already is.  I had to make him dig out the one in the window.

Most of the “experts” said this thing was of no great consequence.  Pshaw.

I need to come over and play with it sometime. I had a very expensive tiny Sony laptop, and it recently died. I don’t want to spent the cost of a replacement (£1000+) right now, so maybe an Eee PC will satisfy my needs.

To geek out for a moment:

I have mentioned this to you in conversation, but it is worth mentioning here. The Eee PC has been cobbled together from obsolete (for mainstream PCs, anyway) parts that Intel has been selling cheap. (Intel produced a new hardware architecture for laptop PCs about four years ago. We are now up to the fourth iteration of that architecture. (The five CPU core iterations are named Banias, Dothan, Merom and Penryn internally at Intel. The actual brandnames they are sold under make little if any sense so it is better to stick to what the engineers call them). The Eee PC is based on a low power variant of the second generation. (That is, we are talking 2004-5 technology). At full speed of 900MHz, this CPU uses five Watts of power. The Eee PC lowers the speed somewhat to save power.

However, PCs in this class that we start seeing in the second half of the year are going to be based on a new architecture (called Silverthorne) that Intel is designing specially for very small PCs. This is apparently going to be able to run at speeds of up to 1.7GHz and use only 2 Watts. If this is as good as Intel claims, I am awed by what their engineers have done. It will mean either much faster tiny PCs or much longer battery life, or a combination of the two.

The point is that tiny PCs are about to become mainstream.

Ooh, shiny new toy, I like it.  That CD is good for scale.  I still haven’t seen one of these in real life yet.  I am a bit fearful about the screen, too.  It looks too small.  But the only way to tell is to see the real screen, not a picture of the screen on my screen…

Michael—that’s *very* interesting.  Double the speed and half the power consumption is impressive.

That’s rather a nice quilt. Can we have a proper picture of it without that computer thing blocking my view?