Just as the novelty of the eeepc was beginning to wear off, today I got a model 2 OQO in the mail. It's a pretty nifty little device. First impression on opening the box and pulling it out was that it was a little 'chunkier' than I was expecting. It's pretty heavy at 3lbs. A whole pound heavier than the Eee. Similar slide-out keyboard to the n810. Much bigger screen.

It comes with Vista pre-installed. I powered it up, just to make sure it's all working. This part took forever. It sat at a "please wait" screen for ages. After 15 minutes, and two reboots, I got to set up my user account. It then spent another five minutes "checking my computers performance" and god alone knows what else. During this time, the device got really hot, and the fans starting running full tilt. For considerable amounts of time whilst I was waiting for it to do something, I was staring at a black screen with a mouse pointer. I had no idea if it had crashed, or was actually doing something. This was my first vista 'experience', but before I'd even gotten to a desktop, I'd decided that modern Linux installations are leaps and bounds ahead in terms of user experience in this regard.

Finally, 25 minutes after I'd hit the on button, I got to a desktop. I moved the mouse pointer, and the screen changed to "shutting down". It rebooted. What was this, the 4th, or 5th time? I'd lost count. After another minute, it had booted up. I fiddled around a little, before quickly becoming bored with it. The fans ran almost constantly. Sitting at an idle desktop, vista pulled around 9 watts, with spikes every few seconds at 13W. Occasionally, it would go as high as 15W. Again, it was completely idle all this time.

After getting bored with trying to beat Vista into using my wireless, I rebooted, and found my way into the bios (Fn-Del). From there, a found numerous things to twiddle (like, enabling PXE as the first boot choice). Surprisingly, there was also a 'Enable ACPI CPU C4" option which was disabled by default. Enabling it didn't cause Vista to use any less power. I guess it's being woken up so frequently that it never gets into those lower states. Given Linux can and will exploit it however, I left it enabled.

Booted up a rawhide install over PXE. Idling, it bounces around 8.4 to 8.9 watts. This isn't an apples to apples comparison though. Sitting in Anaconda is a lot less intensive than an 'idle' desktop.

At this point, I hit my first problem. The ethernet (a Realtek RTL8139, which should be well understood) isn't noticing a link, and hence refuses to get a DHCP release. Some futzing around creating a debug initrd with a shell later, and I discovered that the chip gets discovered just fine. But with one caveat. It detects the MAC address as 00:00:00:00:00:00.

More poking later, but for now, I'm drawing a blank.