So, aside from minor annoyances like low battery life and certain keys that require a lot of prodding to work properly, it turns out the Asus eee PC has a MAJOR GLARING DESIGN FLAW that is causing me a lot of headaches.

The SSD harddrive has only about 12 gigs of space, which for some reason is split into multiple drives (NICE WORK ASUS!) The C drive has 3.8 gigabytes of space, which is just a bit cramped. Especially when the first Windows updates kicks in and begins rapidly filling up the entire drive with useless security updates. I was just browsing the net last night when all of a sudden the machine started whirring, and a few minutes later a bubble popped up warning me I had low harddrive space.

Googling the problem on my home computer reveals that this is apparently a widespread problem. The solution is to turn off Windows automatic updates and just never fucking update the thing. Putting aside the additional problems this raises, even after I turned the automatic updater off, the stuff it had already downloaded was still on there. I went through Add/Remove programs and got rid of all the most recent updates, but that only pulled me back up to about 650 MB of free space on the C drive.

Evidently there’s still a massive number of pointless update files lurking away in the depths of the computer, and I have no idea how to reach them or remove them. Even if I can, I’m questioning how useful a computer with only 3.8 gigs of C drive space is going to be, and I’m considering taking this back to the store and exchanging it for the 80 gig HD model. Hopefully the customer rule I have learned at Coles (complain long enough and hard enough and you’ll get what you want) also applies to expensive electronics.