foothead
Omnicide now.
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This is my review of the ASUS Eee 900a, which I have owned for about 2 months now.
Specs: 1.6 GHz ATOM processor
1GB RAM
4GB SSD
8.9" screen
4 cell battery 4400Mah
Xandros linux
Built-in wireless
I bought this item from mwave for $165 (refurbished) because I simply needed something that could fit in my locker at work. it arrived quickly, and seemed packaged well. It did come in a chinese retail box, but that doesn't really matter to me. I opened it up, and everything was there, all wrapped nicely, or put in little baggies. When I booted it up, it was at the desktop in 13 seconds. The first thing I noticed was the horrible menu system. I installed gnome, and put an end to that. After that, it seemed like a good little computer for about a week. After that, the wireless quit working, so I booted it off a flash drive to try to get it working again. It worked perfectly, so I installed Eeebuntu. This put an end to the 13 second bootup, but I was still happy. Now I am running a full ubuntu 9.04 install, and have had no problems so far. Hopefully it will stay that way, as I am extremely pleased with this thing.
Tests:
I haven't run many tests, as this is not a performance laptop, but here is what I can tell you.
Battery life. The battery life isn't the greatest on this thing, since it has the 4 cell battery, but it is much better than I expected. I will usually get anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5 hours on one charge, though I do recall once when I got over 4.
SSD speed. There has been a lot of debate over the speed of the SSD that ASUS included in these things. I can tell you that it isn't the fastest, but it is fine for most things you would do on a netbook.
Boot time. As mentioned before, 13 seconds on Xandros, the stock linux distro. For a real comparison, it's about 45 seconds on ubuntu 9.04. This isn't too bad, but it could be better.
Pros/cons
Pros: Very well designed
extremely value-priced
fast bootups on sock OS
decent battery life
well packaged
very sharp looking
Atom CPU with speedstepping
The screen looks very nice
Cons: Off-balance (it tips p\over if the screen is too far back)
Small SSD (4gb)
4 cell battery
comes with a crappy OS designed for little children
Slow bootups on non-stock OS
slow SSD (not too slow, but I would like a bit faster)
and it only came in white (at least for $165)
webcam has been removed
Basically, if you are considering one of these, go for it! You won't regret it.
The price of this thing is enough to justify all the cons. Just be sure to put a better OS on it.
-foothead
Specs: 1.6 GHz ATOM processor
1GB RAM
4GB SSD
8.9" screen
4 cell battery 4400Mah
Xandros linux
Built-in wireless
I bought this item from mwave for $165 (refurbished) because I simply needed something that could fit in my locker at work. it arrived quickly, and seemed packaged well. It did come in a chinese retail box, but that doesn't really matter to me. I opened it up, and everything was there, all wrapped nicely, or put in little baggies. When I booted it up, it was at the desktop in 13 seconds. The first thing I noticed was the horrible menu system. I installed gnome, and put an end to that. After that, it seemed like a good little computer for about a week. After that, the wireless quit working, so I booted it off a flash drive to try to get it working again. It worked perfectly, so I installed Eeebuntu. This put an end to the 13 second bootup, but I was still happy. Now I am running a full ubuntu 9.04 install, and have had no problems so far. Hopefully it will stay that way, as I am extremely pleased with this thing.
Tests:
I haven't run many tests, as this is not a performance laptop, but here is what I can tell you.
Battery life. The battery life isn't the greatest on this thing, since it has the 4 cell battery, but it is much better than I expected. I will usually get anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5 hours on one charge, though I do recall once when I got over 4.
SSD speed. There has been a lot of debate over the speed of the SSD that ASUS included in these things. I can tell you that it isn't the fastest, but it is fine for most things you would do on a netbook.
Boot time. As mentioned before, 13 seconds on Xandros, the stock linux distro. For a real comparison, it's about 45 seconds on ubuntu 9.04. This isn't too bad, but it could be better.
Pros/cons
Pros: Very well designed
extremely value-priced
fast bootups on sock OS
decent battery life
well packaged
very sharp looking
Atom CPU with speedstepping
The screen looks very nice
Cons: Off-balance (it tips p\over if the screen is too far back)
Small SSD (4gb)
4 cell battery
comes with a crappy OS designed for little children
Slow bootups on non-stock OS
slow SSD (not too slow, but I would like a bit faster)
and it only came in white (at least for $165)
webcam has been removed
Basically, if you are considering one of these, go for it! You won't regret it.
The price of this thing is enough to justify all the cons. Just be sure to put a better OS on it.
-foothead
