Eee PC - Impressions, Thoughts, Experiences?

[h3g3l]

I've been drawn to the Eee PC for quite some time now as a rough-and-ready portable platform that can "do stuff."

Does anyone here have one?

Has anyone here used/seen one?

I'm in the REALLY early stages of looking around at this point and want to see if it'd be worth my time to continue looking.

Thanks!

 

[Wzrd]

I love my EEE 901. I have 2 desktops and 4 laptops (including my EEE 901). The reason I bought it was because it's light and I can get 5-8 hours on 1 battery charge. If you do light MS Office work, browse the internet, IM or Skype, then a netbook is good. If you get a netbook with a hard drive as opposed to a SSD (solid state) drive, then the battery only lasts about 3 hours. It all depends on whether this is an additional laptop or a replacement for an older one. And, what you want to mainly use it for.

 

[Butterfly Mage]

Well.. This machine is NOT a gaming machine. Period.

But, I've used one for three months and it's very good at what it was designed to be able to do. Mine has two 60 Gb drives, so I keep the OS and MS Office on one drive and my MP3 library on the other. As a machine made for light-duty office tasks, web browsing, and email, it does these tasks just fine. It's also got enough processing power for watching Netflix content and listening to streaming audio from Rhapsody.

Considering it's a $350 machine, I'm pretty satisfied.

 

[h3g3l]

I should specify what I'm looking for (which draws me to this as a possible solution):

I want a machine that I can take into a coffee shop and just write. Surf the web, send email, transfer digital pictures from my cameras, sure. But I'm really looking for this to be a "light, take-anywhere" machine that I can plunk down with and bang away at the keys.

Now that I think about it, I'd also like to stream audio from Pandora.

I'd likely look into the version(s) with inbuilt solid-state memory for boot-up time, battery life, and the fact that I can carry 120GB+ in a 2.5" notebook drive, in an external USB enclosure.

Have either of you noticed issues with the screen? (Namely, cracking?)

 

[Fire2box]

Newegg.com - TOSHIBA Satellite L305-S5921 NoteBook Intel Pentium dual-core T3400(2.16GHz) 15.4" Wide XGA 2GB Memory DDR2 800 160GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi Intel GMA 4500M - Laptops / Notebooks

I would recommend that since it's only slightly more costly then a netbook but it has a bit more power then your looking for. Anyways Newegg always has great deals for nearly anything.

 

[Sawaa]

I'm sort've more a fan of the MSI Wind. I've got OSX running on mine, and it's a fantastic little netbook <3

 

[Wzrd]

I should specify what I'm looking for (which draws me to this as a possible solution):

I want a machine that I can take into a coffee shop and just write. Surf the web, send email, transfer digital pictures from my cameras, sure. But I'm really looking for this to be a "light, take-anywhere" machine that I can plunk down with and bang away at the keys.

Now that I think about it, I'd also like to stream audio from Pandora.

I'd likely look into the version(s) with inbuilt solid-state memory for boot-up time, battery life, and the fact that I can carry 120GB+ in a 2.5" notebook drive, in an external USB enclosure.

Have either of you noticed issues with the screen? (Namely, cracking?)

That's exactly what I use my netbook for. Surfing the net, sending email, etc. I sit alot at Starbucks and McDonalds and do just that. I get 5-8 hours of battery on a full charge.

 

[adaffme149]

The EEE's are nice... For what my interests with an ultraportable laptop that can run a full-featured Linux are, after installing BackTrack (A Linux distrobution, meant for auditing one's *OWN* personal networks, for those of you that don't know), it works like a charm. I'm soon to be getting a Cisco router (One of the nice, business ones), and my friend will hopefully lend me his EEEPC for working with that (I sadly do not own one, but from what I saw of his, it is nice.) I'd reccommend what I've seen of it to somebody, especially for trivial tasks such as surfing the internet, e-mailing, etc. It works perfect for that sort of thing. If he does let me borrow it, I will post a review here.

 

[recovery]

I have a HP mini note, I bought it as it was very cheap at the time, nice keyboard and high res screen. Although the screen itself is 7-8". My only real complaint on it is the poor 2.5 hour battery run time. But I rarely need that in more than a day, and bring my charger in case I need to charge it up.

One of the reasons I stayed away from the EEE was simply because its keyboard wasn't as good and wanted about 30-50% more at the places I was looking at for the EEE1000 than the HP mini note. Considering my HP has a VIA mobile processor and 120GB HDD, unlike the EEE that has the faster Atom and SSD. It runs XP and is very quick to boot up and get on the web. All fast and repsonsive. Nothing upsetting here and I wouldn't expect anything less from the EEE. I wasn't disappointed with my purchase.

 

[SomebodyE]

I love my MSI Wind, its a very nice netbook for typing/internet browsing.

All the netbooks use the same internal hardware (Intel Atom processor, Intel 945 Chipset/Graphics), although I think there's one ASUS model with Nvidia graphics rather than Intel.

Everything I've read says the MSI Wind and Samsung NC-10 have the best keyboards. The NC-10 is rather expensive ($449), the MSI Wind with the 3-cell battery is ~$350, the 6 cell version is ~$400. You might as well add in an extra gig of RAM for $10. The HP mini note looks nice but I haven't used one myself. IIRC it doesn't have a video out, might be important for some people.

The real downside to the Atom-based netbooks is that the Atom isn't that powerful. Its fine for office/internet browsing stuff but absolutely chokes on video. I can play Xvid encoded DVD rips, but anything beyond that and it starts to stutter. Most netbooks come with XP (to reduce the cost, not because its better) and have some bloatware. You can eek out a little bit more performance if you do a clean install of XP or Vista (Vista gets slightly better battery life on the Wind, too), and I really recommend throwing in an extra gig of RAM regardless of what machine you end up buying since most only come with 1GB. Every little bit helps.

 

[Fire2box]

Everything I've read says the MSI Wind and Samsung NC-10 have the best keyboards. The NC-10 is rather expensive ($449),

That's the same cost as the full laptop I posted about. I have no idea why someone would buy a netbook when they can get a laptop for exactly the same cost. I know someone is going to say "but it only weighs like 2 pounds (a netbook)" and to that I'll say " A laptop only weighs like 6-10 pounds, suck it the $^#^ up and quit ripping yourself off."

 

[SomebodyE]

That's the same cost as the full laptop I posted about. I have no idea why someone would buy a netbook when they can get a laptop for exactly the same cost. I know someone is going to say "but it only weighs like 2 pounds (a netbook)" and to that I'll say " A laptop only weighs like 6-10 pounds, suck it the $^#^ up and quit ripping yourself off."

Yup, which is why I reccomend the Wind over the NC-10. Its the best value in the $400 or less range, is very light, and gets outstanding battery life. I wish netbooks had been available back when I went to school. I had a desktop for serious work, all I needed was a machine to take notes on, I wouldn't have felt so bad about it getting beat up from use and I could have really used the long battery life.

That is a nice deal on the Toshiba though.