Hardware Unboxing the Asus Eee PC 900

My laptop is a 15.4" dell Precision M60, pentium M 2.0ghz, 4gb ram, all the trimmings. Its great i can run everything i need on it (including 3d cad). But the thing weighs an absolute ton. I need to bring it up and down to college every day as I take all my notes electronically. I am now seriously considering an EEE pc simply because i could put it in my pocket. If i were buying another laptop today I wouldn't buy a 15.4" screened jobby i'd definitely go with a 12.1 or smaller.


Sure the eee cant run 3d Cad, and sure its not the best at running matlab (the core program we use the most in college) but it does work just fine. And with a spare battery its good for 5hours. One of the girls in our class has a pink one, and even though its pink every one of us queue up to use it, its such a great little machine to use. Her's runs windows xp but I wonder if its possible to run matlab in Linux?

Anyway I'm rambling now but just think of the eee pc as something totally different from a Laptop. As its been described a "netbook" great for word excel and surfing the web.

Regards
Ian

 

those of you speaking this as useless don't have a 300w desktop computer to run.
and as UsIreland said, it is much more attractive than the average laptop due to it's size and weight. think something smaller than an A4 paper, something weights less than a mug of water, something you can hold with 1 hand all day long, and something with no mechanical parts, so you can abuse it all you like, it'd still function.

the EEE PC will manage every day task, even Matlab (a bit slower) perfectly fine, just need more RAM.

my concern is that i want 2GB of RAM in there to run Vista. sure some of you may say it's slow. but i just cannot live without its search/stibility. whenever i go on an XP, i expect to be able to launch programs by simply typing it's name.

 

wuyanxu, you can do the run > type program in, on XP but you just have to have the actual filename, ie to open winamp i just wrote winamp.exe.

I am really interested in the EEE now, before it didnt look as nice and had crummy amouts of storage, but now its a bit too expensive. If they where below £300 I would snap one up instantly.

 

Yeah, I stuck a 2GB Corsair stick in and it works just fine. Beware though, the distro of Linux that comes with it only reads 1GB without modification.

 

Possible article typo:-

The EeePC 700 8GB version has only just hit in the USA, not available in UK yet. The only versions launched in UK are 4GB & 2GB ones.

The CPU is a 900MHz underclocked to 630MHz, so it depends if your hardware info tool is asking the CPU:-
a: How fast can you go?
or
b: How fast are you going right now?

Portability, as stated by others. I can speak from personal experience that the EeePC will fit on an economy-class tray table and still leave room for a coffee!

/me now adding an Atom powered 900 to my wish list for next Xmas (to replace my 700).

 

you're not the only one. i really don't get it. sure, it's small, but i don't see how that makes it more portable. it is still too big for a pocket. if you want to bring it anywhere, you are going to have to throw it into a bag, and a 9" laptop fits into a bag just the same as a 15" laptop. and i suppose it's light, but if my bag weighs an extra pound i don't really care. my n800, on the other hand, is actually portable. it has the same screen resolution as the 7" eee, and fits in my front pocket with ease. it has a word processor, firefox, msn, and just about everything else the eee can do.

@wuyanxu - check out launchy for a good keyboard program launcher for xp, or google for vista start menu replacements. there's a couple of them.

 

The battery life is fine. I've had three hours of life out of it on one charge. When you weight up the battery life/weight trade-off then this is pretty damn good. Low weight, decent battery and small size = epic journalistic device.

And it actually does fit in some of my pockets - I can wear a winter coat or some skater jeans and squeeze it in there. Plus SSD = less worry about damage.

I also especially like the recover option too - as a Linux n00b, if I **** something up then then I can just tap F9 as it boots and restore perfectly to the default install in less than a minute.

 

I love it, but I'm going to wait for the Atom powered unit, well worth the wait I think.

 

There is a little thing in Ubuntu called "Deskbar applet" that essentially does the start menu thing and more - it is really handy. I am sure you must be able to add it into the default install

I will be getting one of these as soon as I can - as others have said, it has sorted all the little problems with the original

 

Guessing no one won the paper, scissors, rock and it became a free-for-all

 

2fathazza - according the test cpu in hp mini-note/2133 is real sh*t only produces heat (aluminium body of the mini note become quickly very varm) and this underclocked celeron beats him even C7 is running at 1,6ghz (in the top spec, the basic for 299 is having 1ghz...lot lot slover, no skype video call posible)

yea mnin note is nice, full keyb, but i want atom inside!!

i am looking forward what dell, acer,... show us soon

 

in most of the tests the hp thing is running vista tho so is already gonna be behind... In real world usage the reviewers all seem to think the performance is more than acceptable.
Given its on a par pricewise with the eee 900, i just think the other specs push it ahead, much high res of 1280x768 is a big step up from 1024x600, other things like bluetooth, express card slot, proper hdds/flash options and general look of the device more than outweigh having a slower processor....
Frankly the hp looks a lot better than tha asus, which looks a bit fisher price "my first laptop" to me...


im going to wait till june when most of the other competitors will be out, as i said before the msi wind is looking well specced, and the ECS G10L looks quite funky too, as it has built in hspda. an updated hp 2133 with the isiah cpu in it may well be around by then too.

 

3 hours isnt so bad, but when you look at other (much higher spec ofc) ulta portables offering 5-7 hours it doesnt seem so good. it all depends what you want to use it for obviously, i just like the added freedom that an extra couple of hours gives you that means you can leave the ac adapter at home...

Im a bit of an ultraportable fanboy, i had a toshiba libretto what must be approaching ten years ago now, and that was awesome great for pocketability too tho a bit cack for everything else

Ideally id get myself one of those 11" sony lappies but the my money tree hasnt been flowering recently

 

I'm assuming that only resets the OS and doesn't wipe out any locally saved data... (though with this type of device, I'd be quite inclined to work on a lot more stuff "in the cloud").

 

Wipes everything, all data and the OS, restoring it only to how you got it when you bought it. It sounds extreme, but it's a handy feature and I've used it more than once - just copy everything onto a thumbdrive and hit F9.

 

does sound handy! before everyone goes out and buys one though, Atom based units are scheduled for June/July. Well worth the wait I think as it's slated to get over the battery life issue.

 

Well, it distracted the whole office for the morning!