Asus Eee pc?

[ViolentJ]

Mrs is trying to get her money back on her faulty CnM minibook from Novatech and I've suggested she get an Eee Pc instead as you seem to get a lot more for your money.

Has anyone got one?

The one that I think would be good for her is the Eee PC 701 green (UK version) 512Mb, 4 GB. With Linux OS.

Has anyone got an Eee pc and if so is it any good, anything she should know? Can the memory or HDD space be upgraded? Any other thoughts.

 

[ViolentJ]

Anyone?

 

[fulhamfcboy]

Ive been doing a lot of research into these. If your not bothered about battery life, then the one to go for is the Advent 4211 £279 in PC World...I usually would wipe my ar$e with an advent, but its just a rebadged MSI Wind, only £70 cheaper....
The EEEpc 901 seems to be the best for battery life, but screen is smaller and its about £300....
The Acer one seems ok as well, although again, battery is poop.....

 

[Ian]

My mate has an Eee, uses it during lectures at uni it's that small. He seems very impressed by it and he's a bit of a tech boff, so on that I'd say that they must be ok. Not sure about expansion etc. but he just carries around this tiny hard drive thing.

 

[oska]

Nearly bought one but the lack of storage space was bugging me so I bought a Dell Vostro for the same money. Ok it's not so tiny but it's been great.

 

[Woodentop]

the first ones have a keyboard that is too small for me.

 

[KDF]

Mrs is trying to get her money back on her faulty CnM minibook from Novatech and I've suggested she get an Eee Pc instead as you seem to get a lot more for your money.

Has anyone got one?

The one that I think would be good for her is the Eee PC 701 green (UK version) 512Mb, 4 GB. With Linux OS.

Has anyone got an Eee pc and if so is it any good, anything she should know? Can the memory or HDD space be upgraded? Any other thoughts.

I bought 2 of the 4GB ones.

They are very cool for what they are, xandros boots in less than 10 seconds, powers off in less than 5, I found it too restrictive though so installed xubuntu. Strangely battery life on xandros seemed to be about 2 hours.

On my optimized version of Xubuntu I now get 3 hours.

In one of them I upgraded the RAM to 2GB, you cant upgrade the internal drive per say, but there is an SDHC slot and it deffinatly accepts 16GB ones. I know a 32GB card is out now but have not tested it.

The keyboard is smaller but I can still touch type on it.

Any other questions just fire away

 

[realnumber 1]

We got a load in at work for the none English students and tbh they aren't all that great.
Poor battery and by the time the OS is on there is very little room for personal data. The screen/keyboard is very small and no DVD drive, quite slow also.
Not the best way to spend our tax money thats for sure. Get a normal laptop, will be much better.

 

[ViolentJ]

What type of memory is used for upgrading?

I should have said that she does have a pc but wants something she can use in bed or in the garden etc to browse the net (with java and flash plugins), email and write letters. So not having a DVD drive doesn't bother her.

If she's in the house then she can plug it in, doubt she'd be wanting to use it in the garden for 2hrs+ (kids wouldn't let her lol)

The Advent looks interesting but what's attractive about the Eee's is the price tag. The one I'm looking at for her comes to about £180.

As I mentioned in the first post she's got a minibook at the moment from novatech which she's sending back to them tomorrow as faulty and has asked for a refund to get something better so she knows what size the keyboards are on these things and can use it ok.

Cheers for the info guys.

 

[riz]

I have the Advent and its decent, the EE pc's were to underpowered and had minimal storage!! But they are smaller but the Advent isnt large!!

 

[Nomad]

I'd get one but can't seem to find the one with Windows OS, don't want Linux. I've got an advert for the smaill white one with Windows but can't find it retailed even on the actual website.

 

[Alex H]

I've just bought the Advent, really impressed so far. Keyboard is fine, no typing problems, can touch-type no effort. Battery life isn't great at about 2hrs with wifi on, but there's a new battery coming out soon that is supposed to extend the life a lot.

 

[KDF]

Well if you want to go there, there is a battery for the eee pc that will last 10+ hours lol.

The memory is standard laptop style memory. PC2300 IIRC. Processor is a 900mhz underclocked to 600mhz but you can unlock it via software and it doesnt affect battery life.

600mhz is more than enough to watch full screen divx video though.

 

[ChrisR]

The EEE 901 seems like a cracking little unit, although it's £300.

Larger screen than the 700 series, more storage (12 or 20gb ssd), better processor and very decent battery life.

 

[MDT48]

I wouldn't go for the Eee PC 701 if I were you. The screen isn't 1,024 wide, which means you'll be scrolling sideways on most web pages, which is far from ideal.

The Eee 901 is the one to have if you want an Eee, but the Advent that's been mentioned is also a very good option. The Advent is basically an MSI Wind that's been rebadged.

I'm actually out at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco right now, and it looks like the whole netbook category is going to continue growing. I'm quite keen to test the Lenovo model that I was playing with today. The bad news is that there won't be a dual-core Atom for a while yet, so netbooks will remain single-core (with hyper-threading) for the time being.

The biggest problem with most netbooks is battery life, although the Eee 901 improved this by shipping with a six cell battery.

We've reviewed just about every netbook around over the past few months so check those out if you want some help to make up your mind.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/06/14/Asus-Eee-PC-901-20G-Linux-Edition/p1

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/07/04/MSI-Wind-Windows-XP-Edition/p1

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/07/10/Asus-Eee-PC-1000-40GB-SSD-Linux-Edition/p1

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/08/05/Acer-Aspire-One-Netbook/p1

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2008/07/30/Advent-4211-Netbook/p1

http://www.trustedreviews.com/notebooks/review/2007/10/30/Asus-Eee-PC-4G-701/p1

It will take a very good netbook for me to give up my ThinkPad X300 though

 

[ViolentJ]

That's excellent, thanks a lot!

 

[Cookie]

MDT, you wouldn't happen to have anything to do with Trusted Reviews would you?

 

[riz]

www.cnet.co.uk,

 

[ChrisR]

We've reviewed just about every netbook around over the past few months so check those out if you want some help to make up your mind.

Cliff Smith did some temp work for us a couple of years ago (well I say us, when I was at my last place)

 

[timmmah]

I saw these in Toys R Us the other day.

Well worth popping in and having a go on one!

 

[MDT48]

MDT, you wouldn't happen to have anything to do with Trusted Reviews would you?

Strangely enough, yes!

I could point you to reviews on other sites, but why would you want to read something substandard

 

[ChrisR]

MDT, you wouldn't happen to have anything to do with Trusted Reviews would you?

Strangely enough, yes!

I could point you to reviews on other sites, but why would you want to read something substandard

Mr Emeran I presume?

 

[MDT48]

Quite correct.

And you are?

You seem to have me at a disadvantage

 

[ChrisR]

lol I'm noone, although if you've got any work going

Just use your site to pass the time during the day, started reading it when Cliff Smith temped at our place a few years ago. He was given the fun job of doing the backup tape run.

 

[MDT48]

Ah yes - Cliff mentioned that to me when he was doing it.

Lucky for him I gave him a full time job in the end then

 

[Mike_182]

Can I have a job? Bored of support TBH, I enjoy taking things apart (technically as much as physically!) too much. The day my XPS arrived the keyboard and top tray was off to see what there was!

 

[172beast]

I've got a 4gig surf one, 701 is it? Had it about 4 month now and love it, using it now to type this. I tried gettin on with Linux, while it runs very very fast just couldn't get used to it so I've put XP on, still runs extremely quick, its solid state memory so everything loads straight away, 10 seconds ish for XP to load. I've not bothered upgrading RAM, 512meg is fine, ideal to surf net and I travel a lot so ideal for that to. Had no problems with mine, used daily, even play oldskool games on it like Duke Nukem, Doom, Quake etc can handle older games without stuttering or owt.

For money I'm well chuffed and rarely use my desktop PC now.

 

[ChrisR]

Ah yes - Cliff mentioned that to me when he was doing it.

Lucky for him I gave him a full time job in the end then

Yeah being the tape monkey (no disrespect to Cliff, but it's how my place treated them I think) wasn't the greatest of jobs. Driving a van about 2 or 3 miles everyday to swap some tapes out, good times.

Seemed a nice chap though, although everyone seemed to coller him with camera questions