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First Full Review of New Asus Eee PC 900
An anonymous reader writes "After months of rumors, the new 8.9in screen Eee PC is out in the open and the first review is online. As well as the larger screen you get 1GB RAM, 20GB Storage and a multi-touch touchpad. It costs more than the old Eee PC, but it definitely sounds like it's worth the extra cash." I always thought the appeal of the original was the ridiculously low price, coupled with the ease of hacking. Not sure if the sequel will meet that challenge.
AFAIK, there are already 7800mAh and 10400mAh batteries on the market.
Res publica non dominetur
I do miss the nice tabbed interface, but most of the bundled apps were pretty worthless and those that were actually useful are free downloads anyway.
The one thing I really want is a 2nd battery pack and external charger- the battery life on an eee is pretty maarginal.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I'm 6'5" tall and have big hands. As I type this on my Asus 701 4G I can say I've had no problems with keyboard size. For what I do with the laptop it just works.
Screen isn't too big of an issue either. For sitting in meetings and taking notes it wins hands down compared to other laptops. I wish I had this when I was taking college courses and lugging around that old Dell Inspiron 8000. This thing would have blown that out of the water back then.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
all the XP drivers are included on the DVD you get which is also the restore disk for the base linux install.
.. that was a fun chalange.. ended up sticking in an 8gb sd card and maping it to the program files folder
my boss has one of the orginal ones.. and putting xp on it was no issue driver wise.. now cramming XP and office 03 on it for him
but drivers where no issue at all
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
No, you don't have a regular laptop. At 2lbs, the Eee 700 or 900 is about 2/3 the weight of a Thinkpad X61, about 1/2 the bulk, and about 1/2 the price as well. An X61 is a very small notebook by most peoples standards to begin with. It's already half the weight of the "average" ~5lb notebook, and much smaller than 6-8lb desktop replacement monstrosities. The Eee wins, even at the ~$500 I expect the US release to be priced at, by being a notebook you can literally carry in your (man)purse. Like a lightweight messenger bag.
I bought an EEE PC a month ago. Just last week I enabled the expert desktop mode after some fiddling around with a stubborn synaptic(ugh just purge the finicky entries, won't you?). I find it a lot easier to use than my Ubuntu server sitting downstairs(on a 700Mhz Athlon). Is it the speed? No. Ask me where I can set the mouse wheel scroll speed on the Ubunutu machine, and I won't know. Easily found it via the large-size Control Panel equivalent on the EEE.
Initially, I balked at the idea of having Linux run on such a nice piece of hardware, thinking I would switch to Xp instantly. Nope, I will keep it, even after years of frustration trying to use Linux as a workstation before. I'm not running it out of Linux advocacy, I'm running it since it actually freakin' works this time. Actively using google's apps already(gmail, etc), it was a nice little touch to have them linked already on the little frontent.
Sure, I can't quite get gcc running yet to compile downloaded apps, but I'm doing just great everywhere else. Hooking it up to a keyboard, mouse & monitor makes it a nice little workstation.
I am working on a project to "liberate" the EeePC so it runs only Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation.
Already, most of the bits are there, but need to be patched in to the kernel (e.g. ACPI, "eee.ko", ATL2 ethernet). There is no free wifi driver working yet, but it is actively being worked on as a part of ath5k.
The other main non-free part is the BIOS. Hopefully someday we'll be able to get coreboot running.
My notes, docs, code, etc:
http://www.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/developers/jebba/eee/
git repository of patched kernel:
git://blaggit.blagblagblag.org/linux-freeeee
-Jeff
Although I only have the 701 EEEPC model (I'm using it to respond to you now!), my battery life experience seems to match what they said in the article - namely, about 2 hours when I am watching a movie with the wireless on.
On the other hand, when I am on a plane with the wireless off and just typing or playing solitaire and listening to music, I get over 4 hours of life from it. So your usage pattern matters a lot.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Uh, do you actually use Linux, or just mouth off about it? Because while we're talking anecdotes, I can think of at least three distros which support the power management on my bog-standard Acer laptop better than the Windows XP it came with -- without any configuration hacks of any kind whatsoever.
The real problem is people who pretend to know what they're talking about.
Pirate Party UK
The real problem is Linux's lack of decent power management, as well as the hardware manufacturers' reluctance to support Linux in any way.
This may have been true in the past, but I'm telling you, I get 3.5h out of this shitty Toshiba U300, without wifi, 2.5h with. Powertop is a wonderful thing, but even without it, turning the screen down and making sure the CPU hits C3 leaves me with what I'd consider acceptable battery life. Windows doesn't far any better on this thing.
If it really was Linux at fault, wouldn't those people running XP on the eee get more battery life out of it?
Of course on Linux you can easily hold the ALT key and drag the window to make the buttons visible. Not possible on windows without third party hacks.
Alt+Space,m,[arrow keys].