Reviews and Evaluations of the ASUS Eee Netbook.
While I’ve been waiting two months for a new Dell laptop on backorder to arrive at work, I’ve been thinking about getting an ASUS Eee 10-Inch Netbook 
What has been anyone’s experience with the ASUS
Feel free to add your own reviews in the comments below.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds mentions that he likes the HP 1035NR
Related Posts (on one page):
- HP 1035NR Netbook.
- Reviews and Evaluations of the ASUS Eee Netbook.
I have heard nothing but good things about the Asus brand, including the netbooks, with the exception of its convertible tablet/notebook, which has some major display and battery issues.
More and more are coming out, however, and as a second choice I would consider the Acer One or Dell 9.
Suggestions for purchase:
-Only buy a 6-cell battery version. There's no point to having one of these if you can't use it nearly all day long without recharging
-Get a version that has bluetooth. You can do some amazing things if you combine it with a smartphone.
-If you're clumsy, get a SSD, which will hold up better to being dropped than a HDD, but the HDD will give you more space (although I did see a 40 GB SSD netbook for a reasonable price)
-Get Windows XP or a Linux machine, Vista is unnecessary for these netbooks and uses up both a lot of drive space and a lot of RAM.
I've owned plenty of Asus gear and they are a decent company to deal with.
I'll probably grab one some time this spring, just for the heck of it.
I have owned mine for less than a day now, so I can hardly speak from experience, but after having researched and discussed the various netbooks for a month, I have opted for a Samsung NC-10 over Asus Eee 1000H as the other favourite.
That said, all the top contenders are quite comparable in terms of specifications (seconding the advice to make sure of a 6-cell battery and Bluetooth), so it will probably come down to details or style preference. Ultimately, I simply found the Samsung to beat Asus in style while at least matching it in street cred.
Got one this past weekend, love it so far.
You can try, for short periods of time, but it will hurt after a month or two.
I don't like the Dell laptops as when they break they are often not as serviceable as I would hope (my brother had an inverter card go out, and what should have been a $30 part and half an hour of labor required a $300 part and a half hour of labor).
Thinkpads (now by Lenovo) are also good. However, for a general midrange laptop, Asus is good, and I have no major complaints.
Where did they get them? Was there something illicit? Does the manufacturer hope for "stimulus" kickbacks? Why do you think there's something partisan in my asking these questions?
I have a Dell Mini 9 myself, and like it a lot. (No moving parts is a big win in my book.)
Not having compared them directly, I can do no more than say that many reviewers who've seen lots of netbooks close up think the Dell has superior build quality - and seeing how cheaply parts of it are made (not fragile, but without great attention to subtle details like removing every last vestige of molding flash from the case edges - not surprising given the price), that suggests that the build quality of the others must be shocking.
(Should you choose one, I suggest buying the stripped model, and buying a bigger and faster SSD and 2 gigs of ram aftermarket.)
They all have tiny keyboards, as Ninja said - for extended typing, plug in an external. This somewhat defeats the purpose of a tiny laptop, but if you have a cheap USB keyboard at work and one at home, it sure is portable.
(Contra einhverfr, I don't think any laptops are as serviceable as that for power supply components, unless you're willing to diagnose and repair yourself.)
I bought an Asus EEE 901 and initially was beyond thrilled with it. I like *small* laptops and this design is absolutely perfect. Asus also has apparently by far the longest battery life, in power saving mode with wireless off I can get 7+ hrs with a charge.
Otherwise it appears to be well made and I recommend it subject to one huge caveat. If you are getting yours with a spinning hard disk drive, fine. If you are eager to take advantage of the flash drive technology, read on.
The 16 gig hard drive is REALLY a 4gig soldered onto the motherboard plus an 8gig which is too slow to run the operating system. So windows lives on the 4gig. Except windows needs a lot more than 4 gigs to run. As soon as it starts updating itself, you will run out of hard drive and the system will become unstable and sloooow. Outlook will deliver email by steamship. You will start to uninstall things, like Java, move everything to the D: drive (asus has a new patch designed to do that), compress, and clean clean clean the cache endlessly, but it is a losing battle.
Fortunately, there is a solution. There is a market for *fast* flash drives with real capacity, which plug right in to where the 8 gig drive lives. Some people swear by them. I've ordered the 32g one ($120) and will reinstall everything on it. I started looking at other netbooks but nothing else has quite the other feature combination of the 901, and nothing really comes close to the design and functionality (excluding the 4gig issue) IMHO.
Honestly if Asus had just put another $100 in the machine to get a working drive, instead of cutting corners with the 4g/8g solution, it would be perfect.
The reason was the keyboard. The 9" eee has a tiny right shift key which is next to the up arrow, with the result that if you try to use the right shift key while word processing you are likely to find yourself two or three lines higher in your text than you thought you were. I touch type, which made that a lethal fault--my daughter does fast hunt and peck and it doesn't bother her. I don't know if the 10" has the same problem--but it is close enough in size to the current MacBook, which is a much better computer (although of course more expensive) for those of us who use Macs, so that I didn't seriously consider it.
The Acer has the best keyboard of the 9" netbooks I looked at, is (or was when I got it) one of the least expensive netbooks, and seems generally satisfactory. Its only significant fault, so far as I can tell, is that it is very hard to upgrade--adding memory, let alone replacing the hard drive, requires largely disassembling the machine.
Unfortunately, the rest of the chipset is a several generations old obsolete Intel product. Part of the watts you save on the CPU you lose back on the chipset (compared to more modern designs). The big problem is the legendary bad Intel graphics chip. This is the video chipset that created the class action against Microsoft/Intel for selling "Vista Ready" machines that were not able to run the new user interface (PACER case number C07-475MJP in the Western District of Washington). Even if you don't try to run Vista, the video and CPU are not able to run movies or recorded TV very well.
ASUS has a more expensive Eee model with an additional Nvidia video chip and can play movies. Nvida recently announced a complete chipset (modern, less power, better video) but Intel won't sell the Atom CPU separately for use on those chips? [Suggestion: consider the issue of "tying" an unwanted product to a product over which you have monopoly power (Jefferson Parish Hospital v Hyde).]
ASUS is a very fine company and their products are top notch. Disclaimer: I have the Eee Box desktop version (Model B202) and not one of the nettop/laptop models, so I cannot speak to the screen and keyboard, but the internal stuff is the same. (How about that, a product review with at least two case citations)
The inverter card converts the PSU's DC power output into AC power input for the CCFL backlights for the LCD. On most laptops, it is a cheap $30 part. I have replaced them occasionally on thinkpads and other laptops. Believe it or not, you can often even replace CCFL tubes if you really want to (though it is probably more disruptive than it is worth).
The problem for the Dell was that this $30 card was soldered onto the $270 TTFT LCD assembly.
. . . and since we're off-topic, "G.W. Bush. . . . !"
Nah, it's so easy, it's not even any fun any more...
For a mobile machine that will not be used day in and day out, but only when traveling, it is just what I wanted.
My only complaint? It was $424 the day I bought it from Amazon, and then they dropped the price to $399 two days later. And now it's $389.
I do recommend buying the 2GB memory stick for ~$30 and swapping it in for the 1GB chip. What with the price drop since I bought it, that's like getting the 2GB memory stick practically free.
I used to travel with a 6-lb laptop until it started pinching nerves in my neck. Three years ago, I went to a Panasonic sub, weighing 2.2 lbs and I can and do carry it everywhere.
I had to make some compromises: the keyboard is a little funky with Japanese/English characters; some of the key are 'misplaced' but learnable; no optical drive built-in.
The upside, though, was that I would carry it everywhere I traveled and could get online with built-in WiFi. The 8-hr battery life meant that I could use it on trans-Atlantic flights without worrying about power.
The keyboard takes a little getting used to; I had a strong tendency to hit Caps Lock instead of A for the first few hours I used it, but I'm mostly beyond that now. At least on the 10" version, the left-shift key is over-sized and right where it should be, though the right-shift is regular-key-sized and shares its space below the enter key with the Pg Up and for some reason the right-ctrl is half-sized(?!) and tucked where nobody would ever find it if they weren't peering at the keyboard.
I've got the 1000, and I adore it. My hand span exceeds the width of the alphanumeric section of most keyboards by a couple of keys, and I can type on the 10" EEE without pain or discomfort, for a few hours. (Just have to get the rest of my body into a decent position.)
I'll echo the sentiment that they don't replace a good desktop, the way high end laptops can.
Oh, and about the mouse buttons that are hard to press: true, but, the touchpad supports tapping. Single tap for a left click, double tap for double left click, three-finger tap for right click. No pressure required.
Touch typing works against you. You can't use it without bright illumination.
But even better than the Wind itself is the customer service I received from MSI when I bought the thing. I needed a small second laptop to take with me on an overseas business trip, and desperately wanted the hip new Wind, and couldn't get one for love or money. I begged MSI to help find me one. They did, and they were seriously nice about it.
The keyboard on the ASUS drove me batty, but the Acer is actually quite easy to type on. The build quality on the ASUS seemed less than that of the Acer, it looked flimsier and seemed more likely to break. The Acer is very well built and feels solid.
The biggest problem I have with the Acer is that the trackpad is very irritating. The buttons are on the sides of the trackpad rather than the bottom, which is an odd position. It's not a deal-breaker, but it's not the best design.
The screen isn't great, but it's good enough. It's no desktop replacement, but it doesn't have to be. As a portable blogging machine, it's ideal. I wouldn't necessarily want to write a novel on the thing, but for emails, browsing, and some light word processing it's got a big enough screen to be serviceable.
I like the netbook form. It does a set range of tasks well and the cost is right for what it does.
I was planning to do the same. Any tips?
For me, the big pluses are:
(a) The screen. 10 inches works a lot better than the smaller ones for these decreasingly sharp eyes, and the color and clarity are great.
(b) The battery life. I haven't taken it all the way to zero yet, but the day I got it, I spent about three hours on battery setting it up, installing software, using the wireless, and browsing videos (more hard drive activity). For a part of the time, the thing was powering not only itself but also a USB-powered external hard drive. Throughout, I had the screen brightness jacked up to max. When I quit, the power meter still showed 50% remaining. So I believe the claims that you can take it to 6 hours and (with even a little bit of energy frugality) beyond.
(c) The keyboard. It's solid and responsive, and (unlike some of the Asus netbooks) the key placements are normal. (I'd prefer if the Home &End keys could be accessed without using the Fn key, but given the limited space that undoubtedly would mean something else would have had to go.) The size of the keyboard (92 or 93% of standard, I think) means that long (or even medium-length) stints of typing can get very uncomfortable, and touch-typing requires a little more finger-placement discipline than with a normal keyboard. (Keyboards have made my own touch-typing sloppier than it used to be, so to the extent it's helping me get rid of bad habits, maybe the size is a feature, not a bug.) But for the typing involved in sporadically writing brief e-mails and memos, it's works just fine.
Battery life and the keyboard were the big issues for me when I was shopping. I've also been happy about the fast boot time (45 secs. to the Win XP log-in screen). I've read complaints about the size of the touchpad, but I really dislike touchpads and use a USB mini-mouse whenever possible, so I can't say whether it's too small or otherwise deficient.
install powertop (sudo apt-get install powertop)
run powertop (sudo powertop)
follow instruction
They're too big to fit in your pocket, but if you need a bag anyway, why not get a 13" laptop?
The keyboards are too small for serious writing (for me at least). But if you just want a portable computer for email, web surfing, and some time-wasting, why not get an iPhone or an iPod Touch? Plus, they're truly portable.
Netbooks serve an important niche: being very low cost laptops. If you're tempted to trick one out to the extent you're paying as much for it as you would for a regular laptop, I'd suggest just getting a full-sized laptop.
I will be very happy when some company unleashes strange geometries to make a (chiclet-style!) full-sized keyboard pocket computer.
I'd also recommend testing them first. Especially earlier ASUS releases tended to have 'bleh' keyboards. Touch typists will find testing those keyboards rather important.
Netbooks in general?
If all you want is a cheap laptop or a cheap computer, there are better options out there. In the 400 USD range, you can get a hell of a lot more computer in a 15 inch package. If it's not around Christmas, Best Buy usually has an offer in that range running mid-end technology rather than piddling small disks and single-core processors. Even if you only plan to browse the web, a real laptop gives you so much more screen real estate, resolution, comfortable performance, and disk space that it's foolish to go for a netbook.
If you're interested in something you can toss around, or that fits next to a large paperback, though, then netbooks make more sense. They're small enough and cheap enough and light enough for non-techheads to carry around and use.
Installed VirtualBox to run Ubuntu Linux beside WinXP, and it's quite usable.
Good keyboard, and the backlight is LED, not CCL. It'll eventually get Mac OS X running on it, and I'll be good to go.
Until modern equivalents of the PowerBook Duo 280 and sony PCG-505 are available, netbooks are novelty offshoots of the OLPC. I'd wait for a very-high quality screen like the iPhone, a truly efficient processor/chipset combination, decent OS-level power management, a useable keyboard, and fit-and-finish that doesn't feel like the best GM could do under the circumstances.
We've bought two net books recently: an Acer Aspire One and an Asus N10. I bought the Acer first for my college daughter, and she adores it. It replaced an 8-pound Dell 15.4, which was about a three-year-old hand me down I'd given her when she started college. The Acer is lighter, smaller, more powerful, has more storage and more features. It has a good screen and an excellent keyboard; much better than the 9-inch Eeee, for me, anyway. The one caveat is that the keyboard is a hair small. It's perfect for her, but just enough cramped for me that I don't think I'd want to put in 8 hours typing on it. I have hands like meat hooks, though, so this may not be a problem for normal humans.
I was so intrigued, though, that I decided to look for a net book for travel to use in place of my 15.4 Acer Aspire dual-core. I ended up with the Asus N10. This thing is a bit more -- they start in the $600 range -- but it is much, much more powerful. It actually reminds me of those jewel like tiny high end ThinkPads and Vaios ... for a quarter of the price. The N10 is a 12-inch chassis notebook with a great keyboard, a terrific 10-inch screen and plenty of storage built by the Asus notbook division, instead of the net book group. I went whole hog and bought the loaded one: High-end nVidia graphics that can be switched off to save battery life; tons of cool stuff like the ability to log in via fingerprint and facial recognition; and the strangely speedy Windows Vista Business, which appears much better behaved than the Home variants. In effect, you end up with a terrific looking, tiny, highly capable ultra light laptop that runs forever on battery for about a third the price of the MacBook Air, with the tradeoff being the Intel Atom processor rather than a Core Duo. It’s good enough to be your primary machine as long as you’re not, say, processing video. I'm switching to it permanently from the dual core Acer. Finally, here it is running Crysis.
Hope that is some small payback for all the fine work the conspirators do around here. Between you guys, Reynolds and Althouse it seems I spend most of my reading time on lawyers. Voluntarily. Who'd a thunk it?
cjf
The largest deciding factor for me was how I plan to use it. I definitely want to touch type but I don't plan to do alot of typing on it -mostly surf the web and use dictation software and a few other apps. For this reason I wanted a comfortable keyboard and, in mid-December, the HP Mini was supposed to have the 'best' although I realize that it is also up to personal preference. Some users really liked the Dell Mini and others hated it because of keyboard compromises. I checked out the compromises and decided they would work for me based on my typing preferences (how much I don't use the function keys and apostrophe's).
Since I shopped the Dell Outlet and happened upon a 20% discount and free shipping, the unit cost $280.
It has 1 gig of Ram which I upgraded to 2 gigs - it's easy to do on the Dell Mini because all the user replaceable parts are neatly organized and accessible and the following website provides a thorough discussion complete with photographs and purchasing information (exactly which memory stick he purchased and from which vendor he bought it) to guide you through the upgrade: agaricdesign.com
I do feel bluetooth is important and although I skipped the webcam option, the mini arrived with one. I got XP because I planned to run XP software and I believe that Vista on a mini is a crime punishable by law...or should be. I got the 16gb solid state drive for durability and plan to upgrade it once the prices drop and the capacity increases.(the following website has a video that demonstrate exactly how to upgrade the ssd: jkmobile.blogspot.com.
I love the mini so far. It is comfortable to hold if surfing the web from bed.
I have tried a few of the minis in stores and so far, feel that the Dell has the best build quality. I do think it's personal preference on the keyboard - that was the most important feature for my decision. If I had more money to spend, I probably would have waited to buy an HP mini for the 'spacious' keyboard but I have to say, now that I have my dell in hand, I am hooked on the smaller size.
If you want to wait about six months, you'll start seeing netbooks with the Atom processor and a Nvidia 9400 chipset,
http://www.nvidia.com/object/sff_ion.html, which should be a very nice machine with great graphics. Will use more power, so I hope the vendors have 6-cell batteries.
We like both, but I vastly prefer the Samsung.
Ion netbooks will probably cost about $50 more than equivalent non-Ion systems. The only question is how much the Nvidia GPU hogs battery, but it shouldn't be terrible.
The other big tip for netbook buyers is KEEP THE RECEIPT. Retailers in NA are seeing a TON of returns on netbooks, like 35 percent or so.
The reason: people buy into the cheap &small story, then discover that the netbook they bought is too rinky-dink for useful work because of its size and that it doesn't perform at the level they've come to expect from a PC (usually graphically and storage-wise).
However, it's a bit heavier than I expected and the battery life only extends over 4 hours with bluetooth and wireless turned off and the brightness at the minimum. Whenever I switch to a desktop, I'm am always in awe of how much screen I have, the screen is tiny!
Overall, as a student who is abroad, I don't regret getting one.
Upgraded RAM (to 2GB), SSD (to 32GB), and operating system (to XP). Easy to do - only need a tiny star-bit.
Get the bluetooth. Unless you are teen aged girl, drop the webcam.
2 months and I love it. I am 6'2" and don't have small hands and its not a problem typing on a 90% sized keyboard.
I thought the Eee was the best choice when I bought it. If I had to buy something now, I might take a close look at the Dell and HP netbooks that are in that size and price range.
Also, this:
"The 16 gig hard drive is REALLY a 4gig soldered onto the motherboard plus an 8gig which is too slow to run the operating system. So windows lives on the 4gig. Except windows needs a lot more than 4 gigs to run."
...is argument #771 for running some *nix instead.
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