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★★☆☆☆
I Really Wanted To Like This Thing, But...
I love the idea of the Asus Eee PC. I've long wanted a nearly full-featured laptop in this size. So after reading so many positive reviews for this I decided to go ahead and get one. Sadly, after a mere two days playing with it, I have an RMA to get a refund. So what's my gripe with it? Several things. Firstly, though this machine has "20GB" of storage, its 20GB is spanning two storage devices, it's not a single drive. The formatted capacity here is 3.74GB for the main faster SSD that the OS runs from, and 15GB for the slower secondary storage. I purchased this version and installed XP Pro on it (since the XP version only comes with 12GB). 4GB is simply too small. After installing and updating XP, there was just no room left to install any apps I wanted, even after cleaning up the drive. Secondly, the touch pad and buttons. The touch pad is WAY too sensitive and finicky, frankly it's just terrible. Even knowing this and trying to carefully tap click, it would way too often instead perform an extremely fast double click, and it would often repeatedly/consecutively do this. This gets extremely irritating very fast. Updating the touch pad driver had no effect for me. As for the touch pad buttons, they are way too stiff. Perhaps they wear down after a lot of use, but I'd go insane before ever finding out. Lastly, and the least excusable, is the battery life. For a device like this it's simply inexcusably awful. This is with the 5800mAh battery: with wireless OFF (FN + F2) and the screen dimmed down to its second most dark setting (which is really unacceptably dark for all but the very best-lit environments), this thing barely lasted over 2 hours. One more battery cycle to confirm this pathetic performance and I was ready to box it up and send it back. I can forgive a lot of things regarding a tiny laptop, the small screen, small keyboards that are tricky to type on, etc. That is totally excusable. But what a tiny laptop with a small screen, no optical drive, and a solid state hard drive should absolutely excel at is battery life, and this fails horribly. Less than 2.5hrs with a darkened screen and disabled wifi is just inexcusable. If you're still really intent on a micro laptop, I still wouldn't recommend the 900, I'd highly recommend you just wait a few weeks for the Eee PC 901. It features the new highly efficient Intel Atom which uses far less energy and therefore improves battery life (hopefully Intel will develop a new efficient chipset to go along with it). I still love the idea of an Eee PC and look forward to what Asus and other companies will have to offer over the coming year or so. If this had a minimum 8GB primary SSD, a far better touch pad and buttons, and the battery lasted 4+ hours with wifi enabled and the brightness halfway up, I'd love it.
June 2008 · Electronics · verified purchase
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