Getting hands on with the EeeBox

Since I hadn't had a chance to play with the new Intel Atom processor before, I wasn't really sure what to expect. While 1.6GHz is considered pretty low to the general computer enthusiast, when Intel first launched the Core series at a similar speed we all ended up pretty surprised at what it was capable of.

So with expectations a little bit all over the place, it was time to power on the EeeBox. We quickly find ourselves in Windows and staring at a pretty standard Windows XP desktop. Thanks to this particular unit doing the rounds to a few other people already, we had a number of applications already installed which was handy since I didn't have a USB ROM drive handy.

It was time to take the unit for a spin; first I fired up internet explorer and checked out everyones favorite tech website, TweakTown.com. I then proceeded to set it as the start page so the next reviewer could be greeted with the same awesome site.

Cruising the net on a whole was all pretty effortless; it's not exactly the most intensive thing for me, but for people who just want to do a bit of email and cruise some websites, the EeeBox is looking like a perfect companion.

Next, it was time to check out Office and see how we go. Firing up this review, I started to write on it. Again, there wasn't anything wrong with it, everything was pretty responsive. Since I was also using a 24" monitor outputting 1920 x 1200, I had a fair bit of desktop real estate so it was time to fire up an XVID movie and see if I could watch something in the background. Not to any real surprise, the EeeBox handled the whole multi-tasking process pretty well.

Feeling pretty confident with what the EeeBox could do, it was time to see how it went with some higher def content. Firing up a 1080P movie had us greeted with a very chunky picture. Not being able to handle 1080P, it was time to see how we went with 720P. While it was looking a lot better, it wasn't smooth. What I found was 100MB sample files would run ok but the 4GB+ movie files wouldn't run as smooth. That's a bit disappointing as the unit would make a great little media center. Unfortunately it just wasn't meant to be, so I continued on my way using it as an office machine.