My wife’s new Pearl White ASUS Eee PC 901 8.9-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 12 GB Solid State Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “small laptop.” This netbook will fit in many purses.
By definition a netbook has no optical drive (CD or DVD). In addition, the 901 has no hard drive. Instead, it has two flash drives. On the 4 GB C drive the programs reside. Oddly, it was configured with the default file storage also on C. I changed this to the D drive because some programs wined about not having enough disk space to run.
It comes with MS Works and we have no plans to put in MS Office. Frankly, most of what anyone needs to do can be done with Google Docs. (I have a thumbdrive with OpenOffice if any heavy lifting is required). I removed several Microsoft bloatware programs and replaced them with applications from PortableApps.com. These included the safe FireFox browser, Gimp for photo editing, ClamWin for anti-virus, Camodo for a firewall, and Thunderbird for email. For ease of use, I left Windows Media Player on the netbook instead of VLC. Most importantly I put Joy’s favorite version of solitaire on it.
Most of the time the netbook is adequate to itself. After all we have plenty of SD cards for storing pictures and movies. But we also have one computer on our home network that shares its printer and a couple of TB of extra storage. That means that the netbook only needs to hold currently in-use files for which there is plenty of room in the 8 GB D drive.
Pros:
Very light.
Very compact.
A battery life over 4 hours of normal use.
Cons:
Very small keyboard. Awkward placement of the right shift key (not a big deal).
Stupidly uses two built-in flash drives instead of one. Ridiculous at a time when a 16 GB SDHC card can be had for only $30 bucks.
The clickers on the trackpad require the left hand to hold down while the right hand drags files by moving one’s finger across the trackpad itself. The springs behind the clickers are quite strong.
Bottom line:
My wife is happy with it. I would probably opt for a bit bigger one with a hard drive and more memory, but I am more of a power user than she is. The light weight, style, and long battery life make this computer a good deal.
