The day I paid $55 for a spare charger

It is said that generic adapters and adapters meant for portable dvd players can work for the EEE PC. But when you dare not use a 3rd party accessory, you have to pay a premium for ORIGINAL parts, right? As much as double the price that you would have to pay for alternatives.

So I bought a spare adapter from the Asus service centre at 4th floor of The Adelphi, opposite Funan. At least I know that this is guaranteed to work without frying my laptop, considering how careful they were not to sell me the wrong charger. I had to produce my SERIAL number, not just my MODEL number, so that they can be sure the charger is suitable for use with my battery. Mine is one of the earlier pieces with battery capacity of 5200mA. It has since shrunk to 4800 and 4400, which probably means they have to cater for 3 different adapters even though this is still the 701 model.

At least I have the reassurance that the adapter will not die within 3 months (the laptop is a year!) and that it will not fry my motherboard. But it is worrying in that if I were to buy a newer model next year, it probably is not supposed to use this spare charger that I'm buying today. This reminds me of how Palm intentionally changed their sync cables such that you will not be able to use the cable from your older model. So no thanks for faithfully supporting them and sticking to them.

Now that I have a spare charger in the office, I can travel a bit lighter when I go to work and not ever have to worry about the battery running flat. I also found a spare mouse. I'm still considering whether to buy a 4GB SD card (or 8GB? *drools*) and I can leave my portable hard disk at home. Pay a bit more to be a bit more mobile. Pay a lot and I can be very mobile indeed.