Like many gearheads, I’ve owned a lot of portable computers over the years — and I’ve wanted to replace every last one with a smaller, sleeker upgrade, from the “luggable” Apple IIc onward. But most of those upgrades have left me disappointed: with the lack of software; with cheap, hard-to-use interfaces; and with “optional” add-ons that were in fact very much necessary to make the machine useful.

And then the Asus Eee came around, leaving a trail of effusive or the $350 I paid for mine on a recent trip to Taiwan?

But I believe in the 80/20 rule: 80% of your time on a computer is spent using 20% of its capabilities. As applied to the Eee, that means users will spend most of their time doing e-mail, working with short documents and surfing the Web. Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, the Eee may be the best computer I’ve ever used. But some of the compromises Asus made to meet Eee’s size and price targets were just too costly for that 80%. I have a list of six more-or-less-critical system flaws.

without a break, visible line or other demarcation in the middle — it was sometimes hard to tell whether the Eee didn’t respond because I didn’t press hard enough or because my finger was too close to the middle.