eee arrives

Ordered it Thursday from buy.com, got it Friday. I think they must have a DC somewhere in DFW because most of my free shipping stuff from Buy gets here the next day.

Unboxed the eee. Looks new, other than the box being opened.

Plugged it in, booted up to WinXP. Took about 15mins from boot to get connected to wireless surfing the net. Most of the delay was "found new hardware" and "what's your name, do you want to register" crapola. Worked fine fine to me.

Verified it worked fine, then rebooted with puppeee on a sdcard. Booted to linux and was online in about 4mins from boot. Puppeee linux is shocking fast, mainly because it is a tiny OS (the whole puppeee distro is 139mb) and stays completely resident in RAM.

The tradeoff is that Puppy's boot and shutdown times are relatively slow. as all the RAM loading and unloading makes it a bit pokey at those times. Boot, for example, takes 58 seconds on my untuned install.

The best comparison I can make is Puppy is to Windows as MySQL is to Oracle. Many folks prefer the free, fast MySQL backend to the $$$, feature-rich, bloated Oracle.