Digital Trends

Asus Eee PC 900 March 26th, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We lifted the Eee PC out of the box and were pleasantly surprised by how small and light it was. It’s a lot like the Panasonic R7 in that it feels like a toy. We liked the fact that Asus includes a little neoprene pouch too. To show you how small it is we placed it on top of our own XPS M140, which is a portable 14.1” notebook.

We pressed the power button and were pleased to see it booted to the Linux environment in just 27 seconds. This is almost twice as fast as the boot times we see with Windows-based PCs. Of course, the Eee PC also has a solid-state hard drive helping it here too.

The Eee is small. Here it is resting on a standard 14.1” notebook.

Using Linux

We’ll admit it – even though we’re alpha geeks we’ve never crossed the line into Linux userdom. We’ve heard a lot of good things about it recently though, and were interested to see how easy it would be to jump into. As it turns out, it’s very Mac-like, if that makes any sense, with a few differences. First of all, there’s no “desktop” where you can put files and links to programs. Instead, the desktop is a series of tabs based on activities that includes Internet, Work, Learn and Play.

The interface includes several tabs that link to programs associated with a specific tab.

We found it relatively intuitive and easy to figure out. Once out of the box, we were online in just a few minutes and surfing the web. We opened the Open Office 2.0 programs and practiced typing for awhile. The keyboard is very small and it’s difficult to use if you’re a touch typist. After a few days typing got a bit easier, but we were never able to type error-free like we do on a full-size keyboard. Unlike PCs, which include all kinds of bloatware, the Eee PC was free of unnecessary programs and even includes a virus scanner.

Overall the Xandros distribution of Linux is very easy to use, even for newbies like ourselves. We found it a bit tedious to always have to use a file manager program (similar to Windows Explorer) to move files around but with such limited screen real estate we can understand the reasoning behind the design.

Running Windows XP

No, we didn’t install Windows XP on this notebook, but you can do it if you have an extra copy of XP lying around. In fact, Asus almost encourages you to do it by providing plenty of helpful information in the well-written manual on how to install XP, install drivers, and so forth. Asus even includes a driver DVD with XP drivers for all the Eee PC’s components, which is fantastic. Even better, if you install XP and realize you made a mistake (it would probably fill the little 4GB hard drive up), Asus includes an image of the factory OS installation on the recovery DVD that you can restore using a USB optical drive. Don’t have a USB optical drive? Asus even lets you copy the image to a USB drive (bigger than 1GB) and make it bootable, and use that to restore the image. Asus has really covered all its bases with regards to XP experimentation, and we think that’s worthy of praise.