Since I am the guy that "works with com­put­er­s" ev­ery­one asks me the same things over and over. So here's at least one an­swer.

Ques­tion: What com­put­er should I buy?

An­swer:

If you nev­er need a com­put­er out­side your home­/of­fice, a eee PC will suck for you, but maybe a Shut­tle KPC will do the trick.

But sup­pose you are a "Of­fice+We­b+­Mail+IM+Y­outube" guy, as are about 90% of teenage girls and maybe 95% of the over-50.

Then the KPC will work won­der­ful­ly for you, if you don't need to trav­el with it.

And the eee could work great for you if you trav­el a lot, or pre­fer your in­ter­net ac­cess on a cafe [1], al­though you could be hap­pi­er with a light-ish, or­di­nary 13" or 14" note­book with a large disk (y­ou know the size of your data, right?)

Do you use it for work on the road, on­ly? Then the eee is awe­some. I dare any­one to need over 3GB of da­ta for work, out­side of some spe­cif­ic data-in­ten­sive nich­es.

Do you see a pat­tern here? I nev­er tell you to buy a 4-­core 4GB RAM box. You do not need it.

If you need­ed it, you would not have­to ask, you would know you need it.

• If you are a gamer, you need a gam­ing rig. But you knew that, so you were not ask­ing me.

• If you ed­it video, you need what you need. But you knew that too.

• If you build KDE from sources dai­­ly, well, you know you need more than one com­put­er any­way ;-)

A Celeron 900 (what's on the eee, prob­a­bly the slow­est non-VIA CPU sold to­day) is enough to play any video, ex­cept ful­l-HD (which makes no sense, since it has high­er res­o­lu­tion than your screen any­way ;-).

A 240GB disk can hold ev­ery­thing you own. Ev­ery­thing you may need on the road prob­a­bly fits on 8G­B, or 40GB if you want a huge mu­sic col­lec­tion.

So, your da­ta can fit in one ex­ter­nal disk (buy 2, do back­up­s) , and what you use of­ten will fit on any note­book you buy, even a eee PC, mod­u­lo a few SD card­s.

So, if it's not about the CPU, it's not about stor­age, it's not about the video board, why would you need a very fast com­put­er?

Buy cheap. Buy last year's mod­el. Are you will­ing to spend some ex­tra mon­ey? Then spend it on­nicer pe­riph­er­als for your desk­top com­put­er, or spend it on a qui­et com­put­er, or­spend it on a lit­tle RAM, but do NOT spend it on CPU.

Here's my cur­rent hard­ware:

• Main trav­el­ing note­­book: Asus eee PC 4G. Can't be hap­pi­er about it.

• Main desk­­top com­put­er: A HP Pavil­lion zd7000. Got it for noth­ing, used.

• Rosar­i­o's desk­­top com­put­er: a In­­­tel box with no fan­s, a 600Mhz P3, got it as sur­­plus from a client for free.

Al­so: a cou­ple of mon­i­tors, a bunch of ex­ter­nal IDE disks (with el-cheapo US­B-IDE adapter­s) for back­up­s.

To­tal cost: prob­a­bly U$S 500. You will prob­a­bly pay U$S 800 for it, since you prob­a­bly have less peo­ple will­ing to dump their old com­put­ers on you ;-)

If I were to buy all new to­day, I would prob­a­bly get two KPC's along with a 9" eee.

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Ex­pect­ed re­spons­es:

• I need a faster com­put­er

  Then buy one ;-)

• The eee/P3/KPC would be too slow!

  For what? Tell me some­thing speci­­fic, I'll try it on my eee an­dlet you know how it goes.

• You man­age with that hard­ware be­­cause you are a low-end us­er.

  Maybe I am! But maybe you are, too. Let me know why you are high end.