My £220 Eee PC and its Linux software is standing up well after a couple of weeks of use but it does have limitations compared with a full-blown PC. The Writer module in Office.Org looks like a Word clone but it does lack some features. For most users who simply want a typing pad they won’t matter but I particularly miss the fact that you can't search-and-replace paragraph marks.

I need to do this sometimes several times a day to clean up text taken from emails or the web that comes in DOS format – that is, with each line terminated by a carriage return, and usually with the paragraphs marked by two carriage returns. The format is virtually uneditable as it stands and I have a macro in Word that cleans it up at a single mouse click.

(If you haven't worked it out for yourself, record the following sequence: first search for twin paragraph marks using the search term ^p^p; replace them with a marker, say zzz; replace all single paragraph marks with a space; replace zzz with a paragraph mark; optionally search for "space ^w" - ie a single space followed by white space - and replace with a single space to clean out multiple spaces.)

For some reason Office.Org allows you to find an empty paragraph –ie the second of two consecutive paragraph marks – but not one with text. The only work-round I can see involves a loop, which means you have to program rather than record a sequence. It is a mega hassle for a common task.

Almost worse for my pedantic journalist's mind is that whoever wrote the menus for Writer does not understand the difference between "fewer" and "less". What price a grammar checker?

My brother-in-law, who also bought an Eee PC, reports trouble getting his printer working; and the machine got the sulks after he inserted a 16Gbyte SDHC card. I'll report more on that when we have figured out what is happening.

He too is delighted with the Eee PC, though. It should be judged as a second machine, complementing a home or office machine, rather than as a main platform. And considering that it works well as a media player, a photo frame, a video phone, and an internet radio as well as a working mobile it remains very good value.

The Eee PC is a great chance for open-source to break into the mainstream world and the Linux and OpenOrrice.org people would be crazy not to jump at the format and make it work. I'll be writing more about that in our print edition.