I want to note for the record that the combination of an Asus EEE PC and a wireless network in your machine room is a great idea. For best results, make sure that your wireless network does not depend on much of your overall infrastructure.

(Yes, we actually put a wireless access point in our machine room. Since the core wireless gateway is also in the machine room, this is far less crazy than it might seem.)

Also, the Eee is smaller than my current lab notebook, which is 24.1 x 15.2 cm (aka 9" x 6"; Canada may be metric, but we're not that metric), and only a bit thicker. The Eee is significantly heavier, though, since we have not yet gotten computers down to the density of paper.

Sure, technically you don't need an Eee to make this a good idea; any wireless laptop will do, since you can work from anywhere in the machine room and wander around as needed. I think that the Eee turns it into a great idea because the Eee is so small that you can park it pretty much anywhere. Big laptops can get precarious in the confined space of a machine room (and at least in our machine room, any flat surface tends to get colonized fairly rapidly).