We purchased the Asus EEE PC 1000he right when it came out and it was a bit of a stressful wait to get the netbook as it arrived in the mail the day we moved out of our old house. Overall we’ve been quite pleased with the computer and haven’t had any major problems. We got accustomed to the 10 inch netbook keyboard rather quickly and I’m not sure we will ever purchase a laptop that is not a netbook ever again..
The ability to slow down the CPU to save on battery power is a huge asset and one that we do use all the time. With the CPU on power saving mode the computer is too slow to do anything other than type and surf the web. If you need to open a file or application it will take a noticeably long time unless you’re using the super CPU mode, which is easy to switch to when opening the one file.
As for the battery we have never achieved close to the 9.5 hours promised (anti-virus software probably has some affect in that) in the Asus promotional materials. With both the CPU and the screen brightness turned all the way down the best we ever did was 8 hours, and that was at the start. Don’t get me wrong, 8 hours is great but we’re closer to 6 hours these days (the computer is a mere 6 months old) and we have been extremely careful with conditioning the battery to milk maximum life.
The final problem we have with the netbook is, I believe, a problem with the operating system. Asus netbooks used to come with Linux pre-installed or at least an option to purchase the netbook with the Linux operating system…they have since done away with this as Microsoft has lowered its price for Windows. Windows can be extremely slow to run on a computer with only 2gb ram (we upgraded from the standard 1gb ram) and doesn’t seem to work properly when the computer is put to sleep as we often find that they computer has “woken itself up” with the lid still closed and in its case…creating a temperature problem that will no doubt affect the longevity of the netbook. We now need to hibernate the computer rather than using the sleep option.
Overall however we’ve been extremely happy with the choice of the Asus EEE PC 1000HE as our netbook for our rtw trip. The battery is flush in back making it easy to slip into our backpack. There are three usb ports and a SD card reader making it a pleasure to copy photos from the camera and to USB sticks. We’ve never had a problem with our wifi or any other piece of hardware. Additionally the built-in camera and microphone are great for skype calls.
Most importantly, the price tag makes this netbook virtually unbeatable. Even if it only lasts us a year we’re perfectly ready to purchase another Asus netbook right away…unless of course we can find a similarly prices and specked netbook from another manufacturer offering Linux.
Why don’t you just install linux yourself? Ubuntu has a netbook version, really easy to install (did it myself on the same netbook)
Hi Elke – Actually did just that back in December and was starting to prepare a post on why we did that and how it has worked out for us. Aside for some initial driver issues with the wifi, switching to Linux seems to have been a great move.