ASUS Eee PC 1000H

EEE PC 1000H

I first started looking for a netbook as a companion for my University work where having easy access to the internet lecture notes would make my life a lot easier. The EEE PC has been a great buy. I purchased the netbook 2 years ago and was worried that I would not adapt to the smaller screen or keyboard, I needn't have worried the keyboard was easy to get to grips with in a matter of minutes (I type a lot and have not had any problems with the shift key position or any degradation of the keyboard which all my previous laptops have suffered from) but the screen took a bit longer to get used to but with some customisation to XP it was soon enough room for internet browsing and lots of word processing. I was also concerned about the speed of the netbook, however I upgraded the RAM to 2gb before turning on and the only bottle neck is the processor and this is not an issue when just using a web browser and word 2007 which is the main intended use of the netbook.

When in high performance mode I rarely have any problems with the processor speed but things can have a bit of a lag if you try to do too much in power saving mode. Battery life has been amazing from the start, with wi-fi off and all the power saving settings on I was getting around 6 hours easily to start with and even now still get 3 hours with wi-fi on. I have had this netbook for going on for 3 years now and I really don’t feel the need to replace it, whether this is because of the little upgrades or just because it is awesome I am not sure, but nothing has really come out in this size format that seems to easily surpass it, I have had several laptops before this and all I have felt were slow and outdated within 1 year let alone 3.

The lack of a CD drive has also not been a problem with using a networked drive from a PC an easy solution until I installed windows 7 for which I used an external CD drive. Now with windows 7 the netbook is even faster and despite dual booting I never access XP and start up time from hibernation with windows 7 is lightning fast. Even dual booting I have not had an issue with storage space despite the 80gb hard-drive although this is probably due to me being careful with what I have on it (no music or videos etc) which are all stored on a 16gb SD card which also doubles up as ready-boost.

The wireless range of the device has been pretty good, as far as I can tell I can get a signal where ever I could get signal with any other device and sometimes actually in places where I cannot get a reception on other devices I can pick it up with this. I don’t really use the Bluetooth much but it is nice to know it is there.

The size and weight of the netbook is brilliant I have been able to carry this with me for hours round university on a daily basis with no problem either in terms of weight or damage to the machine which over the course of the 2 years shows just how robust it is, though I have been using a pretty hardy leather case as protection.

Since starting my PhD one of the surprising aspects is that I have still not felt the need to replace this even though it spends all of its time sitting in one place so you would think I would want something bigger and faster, sure this may be the case when it comes to writing up my thesis but I have written several reports and made many many presentations on this and the only problem I would comment on is that you have the tendency to make things bigger on the screen than you would on a full size screen so when you come to present it things look massive, so I would recommend not just for this netbook but for all small screened laptops that you check presentations on a bigger screen.

This is a great piece of kit and does everything I need to it, as fast as I need it to and is easy to take anywhere.

Summary: Overall this was a great purchase and with the upgrades is even better and I’m still loving it three year later.