Decent for the price
Written: Nov 07 '09 (Updated Nov 07 '09)
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Pros: Ridiculously cheap, does alright for the specs
Cons: Shorter battery life, junk screen, keyboard isn't very good but gets the job done
The Bottom Line: If you can get a good deal on this, and you don't plan to use it heavily, this might be for you
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| radiov8's Full Review: ASUS Eee PC 900 (EEEPC900-BK08X) PC Notebook |
A month or so ago, my Asus eeePC 1000HE was stolen. I was pretty angry, and I didn't really feel like paying the 375 it would take to replace, but I still needed some sort of laptop, so I figured I might as well jump on a cheaper model as I wait for next year's round of better-performing netbooks with ion-based chipsets.
I got the 900 a few weeks ago from TigerDirect's ebay site. With bing cashback, it came to about 165, and not even refurbished, so it was a pretty good deal.
This model has an 8.9" screen with the slow-ish Celeron M processor - not an atom processor like its newer counterparts. My example has a 16GB SSD, the standard-issue 1GB of cheap ram, a 4-cell battery, and XP Home.
First impresions
My first impression with this laptop was that it was even smaller than my 1000he, which was my transition from a 17" "desktop replacement" laptop. It's really small. I would go so far as to say this is the smallest laptop that I would want to use on a daily basis.
Design / fit and finish
For the price point, this really isn't a bad computer. There are only a few things which I think are truly not good, but overall I'd give it a B- for construction. I really dig the sparkly "galaxy black" matte plastic. It's much more fingerprint-resistant than ASUS's glossy offerings. The power button, lights, and whatnot are okay,. I haven't had the chance to try out the webcam, but I think it's the same one I had in my 1000he, and that one was passable for casual use. I do wish that they had included a zippered carrying case like they did for the 1000, but I guess for how cheap it was, that it wasn't really feasible.
The panels are all arranged logically, and the screen hinge seems sturdy, although this isn't really as big a deal with netbooks as it is with larger notebooks.
Display
Definitely one of the weaker aspects of this model, the 8.9% screen isn't particularly bright (even on the highest setting), and isn't very sharp - if you look closely at it, it has some serious grittiness which I'll chalk up to a design choice of a cheap panel.
The small size of the screen makes it harder to read text at normal brightness unless you zoom it. This isn't that huge, since I've mainly been using it to download things on the go, but if you do a lot of document editing or reading on the web, you will not appreciate this.
Keyboard & Touchpad
The keyboard on this is pretty average. The keys themselves are really small and kind of difficult to get used to, but I bet I could manage about 50wpm on it, which is mostly because you end up making a lot of mistakes by either omitting keys or hitting the wrong one by mistake. One serious flaw - one that's been addressed on almost all newer models - is the decision to put the right shift key to the right of the up arrow. This is a pretty serious issue, because when you miss it, you're typing in the middle of the line above the one you're writing. But let's face it - this wasn't made to write novels, it was made to do light activities like email and casual web browsing. It's good enough to take on a trip, but it's not good enough for serious use. The touchpad is pretty average; the buttons are just as impossible to press and useless under normal use as those on the 1000he. They don't really break in well over time, so I tend not to use them unless I need to right click. With the Elantech driver that comes with the machine, web pages would not scroll properly - it would take a lot of sliding to get to through a page. With an update, and after turning off some of the unnecessary functions of the pad, it can scroll through a page reasonably well. It's decent as far as pads go; probably better than most of the HPs with buttons on either side, definitely better than the first-gen Samsung NC10 with the microscopic pad.
Battery life
As I mentioned earlier, my unit has a 4-cell battery. Specifications quote a 2-2.5 hour battery life, and I would say this is about right. It's certainly not impressive, epecially compared to the 9 hours that my 1000HE could get with the right settings, but it's okay if I'm just taking it to one or two classes and letting it recharge often.
One thing that isn't so hot, though, is the fact that the battery meter only reports in 10% increments. In other words, it starts out at 100%, goes to 90, 80, 70, etc until the battery alarm goes off at 20. This makes anything under that effectively useless, since if you're working on something, it'll shut off with no warning. This is definitely something which should have been addressed in the design phase, but at the price I paid for it, I'm not going to complain about it.
Performance
Pound for pound, it's alright. That said, I definitely notice a difference in speed vs. the hyperthreading and faster-clocked Atom N280 processor. This is particularly apparent when running more than one process at a time. Things tend to lag pretty severely in that case, but it's reasonable enough to get light work done. Heat is definitely a bigger issue with this CPU than it is with atom based models. It gets hot to the touch, and I'll assume this is one of the reasons why the battery life isn't that great. I haven't really noticed huge differences in speed with the SSD vs. a hard drive, but it is nice to have something that won't die if I knock it hard. Unless you're in the habit of torrenting 12GB blu-ray rips, you probably won't mind the space limitation since there's nothing else that you could do with this computer that would take that kind of space.
The wireless adapter is just okay. It's not as strong as any of the other laptops I've had, and it loses weak connections rather easily, but it's not horrible, jut not that great.
Conclusion
For the pice, it was a good buy. It'll hold me over until I can get a better model, but I definitely wouldn't consider one of the better netbooks out there. You definitely shouldn't pay much over 200 for one of these, but it you need a cheap netbook, I'm sure you could do worse.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 166
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 801-900
RAM: More than 256
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
radiov8
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Reviews written: 25
Trusted by: 1 member
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