Agh agh agh.

My stove is fixed, but my laptop is broken. I mean, more broken; not only does it run hot and slow and have a broken hinge that makes it hard to keep the screen upright, but the keyboard has mostly stopped working.

If anyone still needed confirmation that I was not meant to be writing a novel this month, well, there you go. At least it waited until I was employed to break!

At this point the top contender for replacement* is the ASUS Eee PC, which is very small and lightweight, and also not very expensive. I am currently evaluating different models, of which there are approximately one billion? (That part is a little confusing.)

One of the most appealing things about the Eee is that there's a version of Ubuntu custom-designed for it. I've been meaning to make the switch from Windows to Linux for years, and now seems like as good a time as any. I've never actually used Linux, but the command-line interface is an old friend of mine, and if I have to change my OS, I'd much rather go open-source than Vista. Much much much rather.

Of course, this will mean a few dramatic changes in the way I compute: using an external DVD/CD drive, relying more heavily on an external hard drive for media storage, giving up some software I'm used to. I'm trying to determine all these changes ahead of time so there aren't any unpleasant surprises. The Eee isn't as powerful as standard-sized machines, so I won't be doing any video editing, for example, or multi-track audio editing, or playing newer games. But I wasn't doing any of those things anyway, so it's only the potential that I'd be missing. And if I really get an itch to do that kind of computing, I could assemble a desktop with a minimum of expense, rather than trying to get a laptop that will do everything.

So this is where I confess that the real purpose of this post is to tap into the collective knowledge of my friend circle(s). Do you, gentle reader, know anything about the Eee PC? Any reviews, caveats, prophecies of delight or doom? Know anybody who's got one? Have any ideas I haven't considered? Tell meee [Invader Zim voice]. I want to collect as much information as possible before committing to anything.

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*Naw, I'm not going to buy the next-generation XO. They're super cool, but the computing needs of a third-world child are substantially different from those of a first-world adult.