My moms computer was dying, so she had me find a new one for her. After some comparison and weighing in the wishes she had (fairly portable, not costing a bloody fortune) I settled on recommending her buying an Asus eeePC 1101.
I helped her set it up this weekend, and it’s quite a neat little machine. Here’s some random impressions I got of it.
* Her unit was delivered with Windows 7 Home Premium and had twice the memory (2 gig instead of 1) and a bigger harddrive (250 gig versus 160) compared to what Asus lists on the website. I don’t see this listed on Asus website, but it appeared to be factoryinstalled.
* I found it rather ironic that Asus puts a really great, vibrant colorful HD-resolution capable display on a computer that simply doesn’t have enough oomph to play HD-content. The display is LED-lit and has a 1366×768 screen that would happily play 720p content. However, like I said – the machine just isn’t beefy enough to do that. Maybe I missed some setting, but I doubt it. Asus also makes a big deal out of this HD-capable display, but like I said – HD video on this thing, I don’t really see it happening. However, it’s absolutely gorgeous on a large-ish netbook. Bright, vibrant colors.
* The graphics adapter is a built-in Intel. This is probably the bottleneck for HD-video, and when Asus starts shipping the Nvidia Ion-equipped eeePC’s this problem with HD-video is probably a thing of the past. However, I found that the Intel-chipset barely has enough oomph to make Windows 7 with Aero run not too annoyingly slow. Things like Google Earth jerked around worse than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid, albeit somewhat usable. If you buy one of these things expecting AMAZING 3D-performance you’re going to be badly disappointed.
* What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? While I think Windows 7 is an upgrade over Vista I still think it’s a laughably tired operating-system, and I question the wisdom of Asus putting it on a frickin’ netbook. Plug a USB thumbdrive in the computer and then wait 10-15 minutes while Windows 7 find and installs the driver? What the hell? Ubuntu does the same thing in less than five seconds.
* Also, despite Microsofts happy propaganda claiming Windows 7 is excellent for netbooks, my experience with this is quite the opposite. Windows 7 is probably a decent desktop-OS (if you can stand it being Windows) but on this netbook it feels slightly overwhelming – and this is a fairly beefy netbook!
* In fact, most of my complaints with this computer boil down to Windows. I didn’t feel like installing something lighter since it already came with W7, and the problem with a lack of native driver for the Intel-graphics on this particular model makes a decent alternative such as Ubuntu a no-go. This sucks, since Ubuntu would’ve been perfekt for this machine, but Intel refuses to release and kind of driver for this particular chipset and as such I figured, just leave W7 on it.
* The keyboard while somewhat cramped is actually quite nice. Good response, good feel, decent-sized keys for a somewhat large netbook.
* The touchpad has multitouch, which is kind of sweet. I always liked the two-finger scroll on Macs and you can do the same thing on this touchpad. Asus also mentions in the manual various tricky moves you can perform to zoom, but this is made impossible by two things. First, the small size of the touchpad prevents any finger-acrobatics unless you have fingers the size of toothpicks. Secondly, W7 has no nice zoom-function, so at least when I tried to do it nothing happened. It would’ve been sweet with Compiz, but alas, no such thing.
* Battery-time is listed at 9+ hours with the included 6-cell battery. I have absolutely no doubts that this is possible, if you turn the screen brightness way way way down and strangle anything that uses power. Essentially just sit there, stare at the desktop and occasionally move the mouse cursor to prevent the computer from going to sleep. In more real-world environments, with the brightness at a low-ish but tolerable level doing normal things the battery reported about 7 hours of useful capacity.
* The amount of crapware included with this machine was painful. Admittedly, it wasn’t a complete clusterf**k but it was quite annoying having to uninstall all the trial-versions of Microsoft Office (if memory serves me three different versions were available), frickin Microsoft SQL Something-or-other, two trial-antiviruses and 2-3 other minor annoying applications. At least they didn’t include useless crapola such as dvd-recording software on a machine with no optical drive.
* My dear mother went for the blue color, depicted below. I’ve gotta say, it’s one of the prettier computers out there. First off, for a laptop it’s tiny which shoots the cute-factor way up high, but then it has this gorgeous blue paintjob on it. It’s quite dark, if the room is murky then it looks almost black but in lighter conditions it’s almost a lovely candy-blue.
