I went to an educational ICT show in London yesterday and took my Eee Pc.

I have to agree that the size made it very easy to carry round, the quick start up time made it easier than keep hibinating it and wasting battery, and I picked up the countless wi-fi signals being used.

I did expect a few companies to be trying to sell the idea of Eee Pc's to schools, but what I did not expect was the amount of Eee Pc's being used on stands to control equipment or to demonstrate cameras, printers and other devices.

The way in which companies are jumping on this little gem only goes to prove that ASUS are already on to a winner and do not really need to be looking at changing to much. I have hacked mine slightly so that after starting in to simple mode I can switch it to full desktop mode. It would be nice to see this option as standard. Your normal average person has never seen Linux running and this would give them the chance a could be a very big boost to Linux.

I picked up my 4gb Black EEE PC while in the States this Christmas, and it's come and responded well to all my initial quibbles.

You're not going to use this thing to play Battlefield, or manipulate those 100's of large spreadsheets for work, but for browsing, note taking, email sending and photo manipulation before firing the whole lot off to a web server somewhere, it does the job brilliantly.

Previously I've been using my Vaio while at home on the sofa, and I couldn't see around the screen, let alone move away from a mains connection for long enough to read the instructions to cook a curry. The EEE doesn't block my TV viewing, and will sit on the kitchen counter well into the washing up (I don't think it's water proof however!)

It's interesting to hear that companies are using them at expos and events now. We do video streaming and score board controls for sports events, and my boss has already been eying up the EEE to run the myriad of software that we use. We're currently lumping shuttle-esk PC's and laptops around to run everything, and we're all getting back strain from carrying them around airports. If two or even three of these could do the same as a single mid-range laptop, then I can see it being a much more viable and flexible alternative to more conventional laptops.

I think as time goes by, all those tech-geeks will be showing these around the offices / work places and coding sheds of the world long enough for people to realize a practical use for the cheap, lo-cost and very portable hardware.

So you're not commenting on the Eee with its native Linux then, because you've put XP on it instead?

Wouldn't it have been easier to put Gimp on than XP? I'm sure it wouldn't take you very long to learn how to do in Gimp the basic photo manipulation operations you presumably need to do as a journalist.

I haven't considered my eee-pc for sorting or checking photos yet, because the sport season hasn't started, but would it be able to handle a Photoshop-like thing?

I have Photoshop - and Photo Mechanic for Mac, but obviously this isn't much use on the Asus.

Isn't Gimp a nightmare for non techy types?

You can install an addon, cleverly named Gimpshop, that makes the interface look like photoshop. If you play about with it for at most an hour you should know where most things are.