Asus Eee PC 1000h

Posted on | February 14, 2009 | No Comments

I bought a new netbook computer this weekend and I love it.  It’s exceedingly tiny which makes it extremely portable.  What’s funny is when I go back to my main Dell laptop with the attached external 24″ monitor it seems huge.  I guess two 1920×1200 screens versus a 1024×600 screen will do that.

Speed
It’s pretty quick I’ll be honest.  I have no issues with the performance for basic tasks.  Obviously I’m not running SharePoint or SQL Enterprise on here.  It’s for surfing the web, emails, IMs and whatnot.  The Intel Atom processor isn’t bad at all.  The one gig of RAM isn’t too bad either but I’ll upgrade it to two as Crucial has the chip for like $25.

OS
It had Windows XP Home on it which won’t work on the  Crowd Rent domain controller.  I had to bum a USB CD/DVD drive off a coworker since it doesn’t come with one and Windows is pretty tricky to install from a USB drive unlike Linux.  I partitioned the 160 gig drive into 100 gigs for Windows and 60 gigs for Ubuntu 8.10.  You need to use Windows XP SP2 to get it going.  Original XP and SP1 don’t have the right PCI Express drivers and cause a blue screen.  XP SP3 wouldn’t load into memory after bootstrapping from the install CD.  Make sure you have the LAN and VGA drivers on a USB stick but otherwise it was just like any XP install.

I’m planning on Ubuntu Linux on the other 60 gigs for the simple fact that I like it.  I want to be able to do Crowd Rent updates and fixes from the netbook even though I can do them in Windows.  I’m not sure how the drivers will work but my hope is smoothly.  I’ll get Netbeans 6.5 up and running in Linux and Windows as well.  Netbeans by the way is my personal favorite Rails IDE.

The built in video works like a champ which will be great for Skype.  It’s great to have this little guy on the couch, in the car on road trips, or on the beach in Mexico on the next vacation.  I can copy pictures off the camera, with internet access post them for friends and family too.  If there are issues with  Crowd Rent I can get to it, modify and upload code, and respond to our customers.  Remember, customer service is our goal and we respond as quickly as possible and a live human always responds.

All in all, the Asus  Eee PC 1000h netbook is fantastic.  I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a netbook.  I was considering the Dell as they preload Linux as a choice but the tiny SSD hard drive was just a deal breaker and it was way more expensive.  The Asus is a great bargain.

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