After 1 month what I think about my EeePC 901
I’ve had my EeePC 901 for about a month now. I’m using it as much, if not more than I thought I would. When in the house or even on the road, I reach for it unless I really need a larger screen and keyboard. In fact, I have changed my typical browsing location from my home office to my living room and den. It’s just more comfortable being on a couch with the EeePC in my lap and coffee on the coffee table than being in the office just to browse, e-mail, tweet, etc.
The battery life, while I do get a solid 5 or 6 hours of constant use out of it, could be a bit longer. The 1000HE looks to fit that bill with an advertised 9 hours. I bought a car charger for the EeePC on eBay for $8 + $3 S&H have have charged it in the car a couple of times while on the road.
The WiFi on the EeePC works as well as my MacBook Pro and much better than my wife’s Dell Inspiron Laptop.
I’ve adapted to the keyboard, but I do have to agree with those that say it is tiny. I have only used OpenOffice to draft a document a few times because typing more than a page of text is cumbersome. If it was my only computer, I could live with it, but when I need to create some serious content, I usually just use one of my Macs.
I did have one other problem, which because I purchased it from Amazon was not as big a problem as it could have been. I had a hardware issue with the video card on the mother board (at least that’s what my experience indicates (and Asus Technical Support agreed)). Asus said I could RMA it and they would either fix it or send me a new one but I would be without it while they made that determination. They suggested that I use the return policy of who I bought it from. The Amazon return policy is great. They shipped me a new one. I just had to ship my initial EeePC back within 30 days. This gave me plenty of time to compare them head-to-head and to copy settings, content, etc. from the defective one to the new one.
Before doing that I compared the default Fedora install and Eeebuntu. The Fedora install boots and wakes from sleep much faster. Opening applications on them is identical and I didn’t notice any incompatibilities on the internet or using hardware between the two. I’m hoping that Jaunty will catch up (one of the core improvements in Jaunty will be boot and wake speed).
Overall, I’m very pleased with the purchase. I really like Eeebuntu but I may be jaded as I run it on several other PCs and like to tinker under the hood. I also recommend upgrading the memory to 2GB for any operating system you are running if you plan on multi-tasking (or running Tweetdeck with a memory leak over a weekend).