Good things really do come in small packages, and that small package when it comes to powerful portable computing is the ASUS EEE 900A laptop. ADHEREL

We picked one up for my mom, a complete newbie when it comes to computers (where’s the on switch), for X-mas and so far she’s had little trouble getting her bearings, i.e. surfing the web and taking care of emails.

First the laptop, or netbook, itself is super light and super small. It runs about the size of a New York Times bestseller, and may weight less. Our model, aka the Best Buy model because that’s where we picked it up at with  a robust price tag of $279, comes with an Intel Atom processor, 1GB of ram and 4GB flash hard drive – more on that drive later.

The computer has built-in wireless, a LAN port plus a couple USB ports, and with pre-installed Linux Xandros it’s plug-and-play ready. Just flip it open, hit the on switch and about 10 seconds later (it loads fast!) the laptop is ready for use.

For my mom at least the system has been real user-friendly. The Xandros GUI navigation makes it easy to go from work to games to internet to OS settings with just a click. And thanks to the big, bright bookmarks/icons, it’s easy to get where she needs to go on the web. There are preloaded graphical bookmarks for things like Google Search, Wikipedia, Hotmail, Gmail and many other common internet destinations. And the default, pre-installed browser is Firefox.

The system also comes with Start Office which provides the usual business applications.

So pretty much out of the box if you are a novice, first-time computer user you have what you need.

Part of the attraction of these smaller laptops can also be problems for some. If you like big keyboards and large screens, this isn’t the laptop for you. The keyboard is indeed ultra-tiny, and the screen size leaves a lot to be desired, but then again if you bought this computer you should not be trying play the latest Flight Simulator game on it. This PC works well for simple tasks, I’m not sure you want to use it to build websites or edit your movies.

That said, the biggest issue with the PC is the disk space. 4GB for a newbie may sound like enough but after the OS and the installed software, the out-of-the-box free space is around 400MB. And after a round of initial software updates space available on the machine went to ZERO. I kid you not, ZERO. Amazing that 20 minutes after removing the PC from the box the hard drive was completely full!

There is space for an external flash chip which we did purchase, but it was disappointing that the internal drive would fill up so quickly.

What is nice was that you could re-install the software and have the laptop reset to factory settings in a matter of minutes, which is what we did but each time after the software updates ran the drive again was completely maxed out.

Fortunately, there was a workaround from preventing this automatic updates so there some space free after boot. You can view the process here. And it does work. With the updates now off, the drive now rests around 420MB free, and after changing some cache settings that should maintain provided my mom doesn’t learn how to download movies and other multi-media files.

Overall, it’s a pretty good, well-running machine and great for someone just starting out. It also might fit in for people who are looking for a very portable, economical laptop for web surfing and email.

But if you are a gamer, a web designer or if you use intensive applications, this probably exact machine, the 900A, isn’t for you. And if you do decide to purchase avoid the 4GB if you can and spend the extra bucks on a bigger hard drive.