Asus Eee PC 1000HD impressions

It has been a few days that I have spent with this new netbook for school and I am pleased to say that I have made the best decision for my personal usage of a Windows PC. The $379.99 that I had spent at Best Buy was indeed a wise investment to make in my financial situation of cutting back expenses and saving money, and I have even inpsired some classmates to look into the Asus Eee PC for themselves! Since recently downloading Intellipoint 6.1 software for my own Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000, I now have a mouse AND Bluetooth included with this machine and my perfect netbook is complete!!!

The portability of this machine in itself is an amazing feature that I simply adore after having to tolerate the bulkiness of the Toshiba 17inch P305! Toting this thing to Panera Bread and night classes has never been an issue since this Eee can remain out of sight and not be too much of a distraction, and I have even used this in the comfort of my own Honda CR-V! The overall form factor is somewhat light in weight and the plastics appear to be high-grade in texture. While the outside cover of the Eee is very sleek with its polished finish, it is susceptible to fingerprints and smudges. The layout of the keyboard and screen is essentially a godsend in the field of small computing, for anything smaller than the ten inches on this 1000HD model would have been troublesome for me in regards to efficient typing. There are four menu buttons at the upper left part of the keyboard and the first two are for enabling standby and changing screen resolution while the remainder are user configurable. I have chosen to program one button to open a new blank Word document while leaving the other to select different performance settings for the battery. Speaking of the battery, the life of it has been good for at least a little over 4 hours for me which is basically an enitre session of class.

I must admit that I did underestimate the productivity of the 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor paired with 1GB RAM for daily multitasking, but I have been fortunately proven wrong in a most impressive fashion. For all that I have called this Asus to do in regards to my computing neeeds it has been fully reliable without fail. As a matter of fact, I am right now typing this blog entry on my Asus via the Blogger site on my wifi network with a Bluetooth USB dongle and an installed 4GB SD card of music tracks that are being played back from Windows Media Player! While I honestly miss the extra bass punch provided by the stereo harmon/kardon speakers on the 17inch Toshiba I parted with, I can still appreciate the adequate performance of the Eee. This unit is primarily for schoolwork after all, so the importance of multimedia features will have to play second fiddle to the presence of bare essentials. Downloading, reactivating and using Office 2007 has been painless and simple for all of my document and spreadsheet management for classes. No lagging of any manner has been noticed in navigating between windows, but there was a bit of slow pacing when downloading big software applications from Online. Either way I do think it was to be expected from the Intel chip since it is in a netbook and not a laptop, a few minutes of uploading large files is surely not the end of the world.

In the midst of using the Windows XP operating system I have realized that Vista is simply overkill for what I need in a PC. The smooth performance of this Eee XP device is WORLDS away from the 2.10GHz AMD Turion in that HP TX2110 tablet with 3GB RAM, and I am not sure if the HP suffered from the demanding Vista OS or from a lackluster AMD chip. It just goes to show me that it's never wise to bite off more than I can chew, especially when it comes to PC being my secondary after the Mac. There is no need for video editing, movie viewing, video gaming, photo altering, music creating or any other kind of complicated task on this Eee, so having less than what I'm accustomed to with features is quite alright and hasn't bothered me. Office 2007 functions, web access, email and occasional playback of music (from an SD card and not an uploaded music library) are all perfectly suited for this model, and I am proud to be an Eee owner!

The included photo of my Eee setup was taken with my Nokia E71, transferred to my Eee via Bluetooth and then posted to this blogpost via the Blogger utility.

TRENT
Sent from my Asus EeePC 1000HD