Eee PC 901 Review
Netbooks seem to be the latest craze, and with good reason. Many are affordably priced and verge on the edge of an impulse buy. They tend to be highly portable and well equipped for handling the day to day tasks of checking email, browsing the internet, instant messaging and even office productivity. The combination of price, portability and technical capabilities can make netbooks very tempting indeed.
Amidst a small bout of research, I chose to get an Eee PC 901 with Windows XP. Like most in its class, it has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 12GB SSD an 8.9 inch display, a 1.3 megapixel camera and weighs about 3 pounds. It also has a 6 cell battery, built-in Bluetooth and 20GB online storage via Asus. After spending a week of using my Eee PC as regularly as possible, here are my observations.
Design
The outer design of the Eee PC 901 isn’t as thrilling like my Macbook Pro, but it’s cute and functional. I chose the white shell because I don’t want to deal with the fingerprints on the cover and the palm rests (my coworker who just got a new Dell XPS understands). The touchpad is large and worked well enough out of the box. The keyboard however, is painfully small and I can understand the many complaints about it. Since I have small fingers, touchtyping is feasible with enough practice. In fact, this article has been entirely written using my Eee PC. The main problems I’m experiencing are the apostrophe and right shift key. The apostrophe is real close to the enter key and the right shift key is located to the right of the up arrow key. The keyboard seems quite responsive and I have yet needed to do the “tape mod.” An internal design decision that I find quirky is having the 12GB SSD drive split into two drives; a 4GB and an 8GB.
Graphics/Display
I don’t intend to play any games on my Eee PC but do intend to watch a few movies on it. The display can reach a maximum of 1024×600. It can also go up to 1024×780 but goes off screen and you have to scroll. There is a compress mode but that distorts the render of the screen and doesn’t look that great to me. However, the 1024×600 resolution is quite alright for browsing the net, reading email and even watching movies, which I tested with Transformers and the quality was fine and wasn’t sluggish, especially since I was running it off an external USB flash drive. The most irritating bit about the display is the brightness level. It initially starts at 100% but once the level is modified, it remained stuck at about 61-63%. To address this, I initially installed eeectl (http://cpp.in/dev/eeectl/) which allowed me to increase the display brightness, among other things. Then I found the Asus BIOS revision 1501, which seems to fix the problem.
Sound
The sound isn’t spectacular, but isn’t bad either. Only thing is the speakers are located on the underside of the front end of the palm rests so it can get muffled. The sound was also okay with my “use with anything” (my reference because the default jack fit perfectly in the gen1 iPhone) Bose headphones.
Connectivity
Out of the box, the wifi worked very well with regular WEP networks but hiccuped on a combination WPA2 and hidden network (my macbook had no problems at all). I have Service Pack 3 but still needed to update the adapter driver, now it works just fine. I haven’t tested the Eee PC’s Bluetooth yet. There’s also an Ethernet port, but I haven’t used it at all. There are three USB ports, which for me is one port too much, but better too much than too little (Macbook Air). I haven’t tested the VGA port for external monitor goodness and have yet to get an SD card for the integrated slot, however I do intend to make use of it. Incidentally, I don’t miss an express card slot, like my Macbook has, because the only use I had for it was to read SD cards.
In conclusion, after doing some customization and updating of some drivers and applications, the Eee PC 901 is running really smooth and has met my expectations positively. With the 6 cell battery and some toning down of the display and sound, I’m getting an average of 5 hours of use from this little bugger. Definitely portable as I don’t have to stay wired to anything and it’s light and easy to carry around. It may not be the best netbook out there, since this is my first I can’t compare it, but it’s working very well for me.
In case there’s interest, here’s a list of stuff I did to my Eee to either customize it to my liking or increase its usability.- Installed eeectl (mainly for display brightness, but can control fan speed and overclocking, etc.)
- Updated BIOS to 1501 (to address display brightness)
- Installed TweakUI (Activate some UI eye-candy)
- Installed Vista Inspirat theme pack
- Installed Launchy (I got spoiled by Quicksilver on the Mac)
- Updated the wifi adapter
- Installed ECap utility for the integrated camera
- Updated the touchpad drivers/control panel
- Installed 2GB RAM and set 512MB for Ramdisk using Gavotte’s ramdisk app to shunt temporary internet files onto, instead of my SSD
