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I’m back from the Heineken Regatta now and here’s what worked and didn’t work with my ASUS.

Overall the ASUS was a terrific little machine both on and off the water. In addition, it drew lots of attention and when I told people the price, they were flabbergasted!

Pluses

• Portability was outstanding. I was able to wedge it into a cup holder on the boat. Off the boat, my wife carried it in a very small purse.
• Communications was great. We were able to pick up WiFi connects everywhere we went on the island. I checked email and video-Skyp’d friends and family while sipping wine at the many French restaurants in Grand Case.
• On the boat, my charting software worked flawlessly with the add-on GPS receiver sitting on the navigation station table. We did lose connectivity a few times when the boats boom was on centerline. This was easily solved my moving the hockey-puck receiver.
• Window XP worked as it does with all XP computers. I got occasional error messages and one or two lock-ups, but nothing out of the ordinary. Restarts resolved these problems.
• XP boots and shutdowns are delightfully fast when XP is configured as recommended in the ASUS manual.
• Low stress when abusing this inexpensive machine makes it a perfect on-the-go tool.

Negatives

• The keyboard is too small for my massive hands. I did get better with practice, but in my opinion, the machine is not suited for sustained word processing.
• The screen resolution is too low for working with online blogging tools. The problem I encountered was that my WordPress blog editor would not display the full text width. My solution was to write and edit offline, and then cut and paste into the blog editor. This worked well enough, but made working on blog layouts quite difficult.
• Battery life is only 3 hours. Needless to say, it would be nice to get more! To extend battery life, I turned wireless functions off when not needed and turned the machine off when not in use. This helped greatly.

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