Q: is that a good computer for a college student? i don't know anything about them...
A: the eee laptops are "different" from most other laptops... they really are not considered laptop computers, they, along with a few other new computers such as the Acer Aspire One, are considered to be netbooks, as opposed to NOTEbooks. Generally a netbook has a very lowe power CPU, low in both power consumption AND in processing speed. The newer eee's use the intel atom CPU, the older ones use a celeron CPU with it's clock-rate reduced severely to drop the power consumption. The celeron based eee's get only a few hours of battery life, the atom's can get 6-7 hours. They come in both a stripped-down windows XP flavor and a linux flavor. The performance on the linux versions is quite a bit higher than in the XP versions. The keyboard is NOT "normal" sized. They keys are actually about 15% smaller and closer together than a standard keyboard and some find it difficult to type on, while others have no problem. There is NO CD/DVD drive built into the eee's If you want/need CD/DVD you will need to add an external USB drive, costing another $100 or so. The Solid State hard drives in all the models are "small" in comparison to a typical hard drive. the "larger" one is 20GB on the linux model, and only 12GB on the windows xp model. The SSD drives are more durable as far as shocks/bumps, but DO have a limited life-span... as SSD devices can only be written to a limited number of times... but they should last 4 or 5 years under typical conditions, but they are NOT replaceable. For the price that the eee pc's are going for, and considering the lack of CD/DVD... unless you need the ultra portability afforded by them, they are really NOT a good value at the $400-$600 price range they are asking, and if you are looking at one of the older celeron based units in the $300-$400 range, it's really even a worse deal, considering the MUCH smaller (4 and 8GB drives) slower processor and lower battery run times. Oh... also, system memory is only 512 megs in most of the models, although they CAN be expanded.