Rockjaw asked me over on Twitter for my hands on opinion of the ASUS Eee PC Netbook. So what better way to give them than writing this blog post up on my Eee? I -was- using GNOME-blog to do this, but after accidently copying and deleting a chunk of text with no undo key, I quickly said ‘F^3 that’ and started off again in OpenOffice.
There may be pictures, but I have to censor them first for graphic and lewd depictions of one woman’s love for her netbook. I kid.
The PC would get jealous if I brought a fourth into the home network. /rimshot
Anyway, it’s time to talk Specification, Specification, Specification.
I picked up the 901 Linux model in white, because the black model was around £10-£15 more expensive, from www.superetrader.co.uk for £240 inc VAT, with £7.99 for next day delivery. The 901 Linux Model comes with:
8.9inch screen, 1.6ghz Intel Atom processor, 1gb RAM (Upgradable to 2gb, which I may just do), built in 1.3mpxl webcam, microphone, SDHC/MMC reader, 3 usb ports, bluetooth, 802.11n WLAN, a 4gb System SSD and a 16gb SSD for data, along with the modified Xandros based Linux OS, a 6 cell battery, charge, dvds for the system and a handy black case for it, plus a cloth to clean the glossy case with.
Setting it up was fairly easy, though I will advise people now that the Epson printer driver update is bugged, so skip it when updating your machine.
Xandros will suit some people well, but for me? It had its bugs that niggled at me, such as being on a read only drive so any updates you did went to the 16gb SSD instead, programs being uninstallable, and Star Office only coming with a Russian and Polish dictionary. Skype works well on it thought.
The keyboard is dinky, and anyone with slightly larger hands may prefer the Eee 1000 series, as they have 95% size of laptop keyboards, at the expense of being less portable, which for a netbook…
Good news is that with an external DVD drive, you could install WinXP SP2 on the machine, and the disks come with the windows drivers. Or, if you’re like me and wanting to get away from Windows, you could try a netbook version of a desktop Linux distro, in my case Eeebuntu.
A USB memory stick or a card reader with an appropriate card, plus Unetbootin can be used on both Windows and Linux to create a live disk to try it out on, though to do so you need to plug it in, hold down F2 when starting the Eee up, exit the bios when it appears and hold down ESC straight away to bring up the boot device menu.
Installation takes between 10-30 minutes and is relatively pain free, and it took about 20-30 more minutes to get the system up and running with the software I needed, and some tinkering to get things running fine. Still on the look out for any bugs though. Have another PC near by to Google-fu any issues. I also installed Eee Control which is a handy little program that enables performance switching and scaling, hotkey control and so forth.
Battery life is good so far, not yet so used to the system that can tweak it further, and later on I may switch GNOME for XFCE to try and get some better memory performance. It can struggle a little when running YouTube, and it does not like full screen that much with some video stutterage at times.
Other than that, this is certainly a capable little machine, once you get used to the touchpad and typing on it, and is just the right size and weight for using as an eBook and comic reader.
Questions in the box below or ask me on Twitter.
Eeesy as that.
