eee pc 1000 Pretty Cool

Well as you may have guessed from an earlier post, I splurged and got myself an eee PC 1000 last week. If you aren't familiar with the eee, its a line of ultra portable laptops from Asus. The machines generally weigh less than 3 pounds and can cost as little as $350. The more inexpensive models have a very small 7 inch screen, small keyboard, and limited disk storage.

The eee 1000 has a 10 inch screen with a 1024x600 resolution, a 40gig solid state hard drive (SSD), and a fairly good sized keyboard. In addition, the 1000 uses the new very power efficient Intel Atom processor. Although at $670, the 1000 isn't exactly cheap, it is a pretty good price considering what you get (the SSD being a prime example). And its really inexpensive if you compare it to the $1800 starting price of a Macbook Air.

First Impressions

Here are some of my first impressions after a week

• The 1000 has a great screen, bright and colorful. Web surfing works well as most sites fit in the 1024 pixel width. You do end up running all your applications full screen, but the eee has a Windows like task switcher so that is not really an issue.


• The built in speakers are amazingly good. You won't need a separate set of speakers with this laptop.


• The Xandros Linux distro seems to be very stable and easy to use. Since its Debian based, its easy to install new applications. A much better experience than the one I had with the HP 2133 and its crappy SUSE distro.


• Configuring the UI can be a little tough as discussed in my previous post. But just adding the Start menu solves most of those problems. I don't really plan to make many changes to the base setup.


• Web surfing performance is quite good. I have tried the Wifi at a couple different places and sites load smoothly and quickly.

Overall I am quite impressed with this little machine. If you are interested in trying an ultra portable, but don't want to mortgage the house, give the eee pc 1000 a look.