My New Laptop

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a new laptop as a self-congratulatory birthday prezzie. I've got a work laptop, but it's a bit large and heavy for my purposes. The one I ended up getting was the Asus Eee 1005PE with Windows 7 Starter Edition. I got the black one but it also comes in white. It has a 10.1-inch screen, a 250GB hard drive, a 1.66GHz processor and 1GB of RAM (upgradable to 2GB). It also has a six cell battery and is notable for the very long battery life, which to me is one of the most important aspects. As with most small laptops there is no optical drive; there are three USB ports plus the usual essentials.

So after starting it up for the first time I proceeded to delete all the crapware that is part and parcel of all new computers. This forum thread was a great help. They try to sell you Microsoft Office when you buy the machine, and even if you decline (as I did) a trial version is pre-installed. I consider trial versions of everything to be crapware, so I said goodbye to this and numerous other 'user empowering' rubbish.

A list of free applications under Windows 7 is given in this thread. With help from the list, I ended up installing the following.

Internet: Firefox, Utorrent, Bit Torrent
Office: Open Office, Abiword, MikTeX, TeXnicCenter, R
Audio: Audacity, Foobar2000, iTunes
Video: Any Video Converter, GOM, VLC, Movie Maker
Images: GIMP, Picasa, FastStone, Photoscape
Viewers: Foxit, Ghostscript, Ghostview
Tools: IZArc, K-Lite Codecs, PdfCreator, Security Essentials

After buying a dongle I'm now fully internet mobile!