While I do have my preference when it comes to Macs vs. PC, I have to admit a certain fondness for my latest acquisition.
My workhorse MacBook has been and still is a great machine. It has a 3 hour battery life and it’s about 7 pounds including a light sleeve and the power supply. With a 13″ screen and 2Ghz CPU, it’s a good compromise between size, power, and portability.
Lately, I felt the need to be able to carry a smal lightweight laptop with a relatively long battery life. The MacBook Air was a contender, but I did not want to pay another $1800 to shave two pounds off my daily carry machine, and sacrifice power and options in the bargain.
I’ve found a compromise. I’ve recently acquired an ASUS eee PC 1000H. It’s a tiny, 3 pound “netbook”. It sports a 10 inch screen, and is a good bit smaller than a standard sheet of paper. The power adapter adds only a few ounces. It isn’t quite as powerful as a MacBook, but the price is right.
Conveniently enough, it’s dropped $100 in price, and the hard drive capacity has doubled to 160GB. Mine was $549. A few days after I bought mine, the price dropped to $449 for the 80GB model and $479 for the 160GB model. An extra 160GB of storage, I think, is well worth the $30 bucks.
Edit: As of March 2009, the 1000HA is available for $349, and the 1000HE with 9.5 hours battery life, is at $379.
ASUS Eee PC EPC1000HE-BLK005X Fine Ebony 10.0″ WSVGA Netbook
ASUS Eee PC EPC1000HA-BLK001X Black 10.0″ WSVGA NetBook
attery. I’ve often lamented my other laptop’s unwillingness to go bright to plugged-in levels on battery (yes, it eats more power), but this goes sharp.
Keyboard is decent. My hands are normal man size (?) but I’m getting used to it. Backspace could be larger.
Single speaker is pretty terrible. Not loud, don’t think about listening to music on it. It has a headphone jack, though.
Restore feature is nice addition. I have not tried it out, though.
This gets three stars because it is capital S.L.O.W. Now, granted apparently these 1.6 ghz CPUs are more like a Celeron of half the mhz or a bit more, but I just found in general using this on Windows Starter 7 to be unenjoyable. Everything lags. Loading Internet Explorer takes too long. Google Chrome takes too long. Opening new tabs within the browser is quick but then loading each one is slow. Scrolling skips from time to time as something else thinks about loading. Go into control panel and watch the progress bar. Literal