Well, I’ve finally received my EEE PC 900 in black and it does look just sexy. Linux I got bored with so I didn’t hesitate to put windows on. The screen is not a bad resolution and the contrast isn’t half bad either. The keyboard is well proportioned, but some keys feel out of place at first use, but as I’m typing this review, I’m getting more used to it.
The EEE PC 900 black is without doubt well worth the money priced at a mere 289.00 and if you’ve got a copy of windows handy, makes this the ideal travel companion. It’s easily transportable in one hand, with it little protective wallet. It takes about 30 seconds load up and about half the time to shut down. The cameras pretty good quality and the speakers aren’t half bad either, although I not sure if I agree them being on the bottom of the unit.
The battery I seem to get about 2 and a half hours, but I haven’t been in a situation where I can test the battery continuously. As I said before it’s a great travel companion so it’s on and off all day. The battery light flashes at 10%, but it seems to have enough stamina to go on for quite a while considering it has a ‘low’ battery. The battery goes down in 10% intervals, which found quite odd.
Windows was fairly easy to install, but you do need service pack one or higher. I’ve used a program called Nlite. Nlite downloads your windows XP installation CD to the pc temporarily and looks at what it can remove from it to make the installation on your machine lighter. Visual elements, drivers, sounds, and windows elements are some to mention, but does go to great depth to make sure that windows is customizable as possible. Compared to the 701 series its very similar, but the case feels different, and obviously the screen size. The case on the 70 series in a rough matt where the 900 it’s a smooth and slightly glossy appearance.
The webcams pretty good quality at 1.3 meapixels, and having the built in microphone makes it great for video conferencing, but I haven’t used them in that scenario yet. I still cant get over the price, but for another £70 you can get the 901 series which ill incorporate the new Intel ‘atom’ processor at 1.6Ghz, instead of the 900 series which runs at 900MHz. I feel no remorse for getting this version. My theory seems to prove true that you can have an amazing processor, but I your hard drive cant cope, then why bother?
I built from scratch my ‘stallion’ with a 3GHz quad core extreme and I bloody wet out of my way to get that mother of a processor, I also got a 10,000rpm hard instead of the classic 7,200 rpm. Yet a laptop with a 900MHz boots up in a quarter of the time since the hard drive is solid state! There’s hardly any lag, and installations fairly quick too. There are some disadvantages with solid state memory, the main reason being that the price is very high, If I remember rightly, they can be more susceptible to errors since the data is stored on an array of chips.
Overall I’m more than happy with my purchase, and I would give it a 5 out of 5 for price, 4 out of 5 for features an design, 4 out of 5 for ease of use, with overall installation and would recommend this amazing laptop to anyone, and for you games out there, apparently, this passes the mark for playing world of warcraft on too! Don’t quote me on that but it was a popular game that I saw!
