if you use firefox the fireftp plug in is all you need, and it saves you from having to run bloaty java crap.

i find it amusing that a lot of the "coffee is bad so i don't drink it" types will happily guzzle caffeinated soda and/or tea all day long.

gos is bloody awful.

i use pidgin on the eee pc and i'm pretty happy with it. i admit i don't really do much with it besides messaging and occasional file xfers but it's been very solid. my regular laptop is a mac, so i use adium on there.

@FreshJulius: the ps3 will upconvert the video, including divx/xvid. no need to do it beforehand.

@Guillaumeb: believe what you want. once you get used to it, the eee is quite effective for most things.

for general purpose keeping up with stuff, the eee pc and the blackjack II do just fine. if i actually have to be productine (HAH!) then it's either the 17" macbook pro from work or my trusty 15" g4 powerbook, tethered to the blackjack if i'm not somewhere with wifi. 3g data ftw.

tveristy will also stream to the wii, along with the million other things it does.

this is seriously one of the saddest things i've seen on lh so far.

i run pidgin on the eee pc and i really like it. thanks for the tips.

@firesign: sorry, i mean the mpaa of course.

i find it interesting that the old dvd decrypter program got threatened out of existence for doing exactly what all these programs do, and yet the riaa is not trying to make them go away.

@iandol: yeah, i liked the translucent menus too. they should've given an on/off option or a slider rather than turn them off altogether. friggin whiners.

@sleuthor: i'm running it on a 1 ghz 15" g4 aluminum powerbook. had some install problems that turned out to be caused by some 3rd party stuff but easily fixed. other than that, no issues, and it actually seems peppier than 10.4 did.

ok, most of those tips are pretty old but the only one i'm not sure of is the one about the equalizer. i don't get how sound optimization can drain the battery that much. does boosting bass really draw that much power? that doesn't seem right. one big thing they don't mention is that audio file bitrates can have a big…

@Maffu: don't even get me started about vista wifi. it's fine on open networks as far as i know. however, if you have a secure wpa2-enterpise network like we run here at work, vista is a pain in the ass.

@Kepper: users don't have to put junk software on them. dell and other pc oems do plenty of that for them, and i'm not talking about the os.

some good tips there. i've used OO for awhile and i like it. it's been nice to be able to do editing of some standard word documents in OO on my eee pc.

love for tversity. i play pretty much anything on anything. ps3, xbox360, ipod, psp, you name it. dunno if it works with tivo since i don't have one.

@nicopolitan: winnah!