Do Your Arms Creak From Your Laptop

Mine does. I use a rather weighty weighty Presario Core2Duo clocked at 2Ghz. It does everything I want it to do- from webmastering to multiple image editing and the occasional architectural drafting on AutoCad 2007. There’s just one hitch. It’s heavy as hell. To make matters worse, it’s battery conks at 1.5hours so lugging along a portable battery adds on to its already monstrous weight. My Prada body bag long gave up its sexy svelte form from this fat notebook.

Now, I’ve been eyeing those spanking new ultramobile PCs for a bit but frankly, the restrictive storage space of 2GB to 4GB turned me off. That leaves me little room to do much of anything. It’s a mere email machine- something I can do on my Ericsson P1i.

But then Asus launched the EEE PC900. And that changed my perception of Ultramobile PCs altogether.

Check out the specs:

Processor

• Processor 900Mhz (full!)

RAM

• Installed Size
• 1 GB

Storage

• Hard Drive
• 12 GB Solid State Drive

Card Reader

• Card reader type
• Card reader

• Supported flash memory cards
• MultiMediaCard, SD Memory Card, SDHC Memory Card

Display

• Display Type
• 8.9 in TFT active matrix

• Max Resolution
• 1024 x 600 ( WSVGA )

Notebook Camera

• Camera Type
• Integrated

• Notebook Camera / Sensor Resolution
• 1.3 Megapixel

Multimedia Functionality

• TV Tuner Type
• None

Networking

• Networking / Wireless LAN Supported
• Yes

• Data link protocol
• Ethernet, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g, Fast Ethernet

• Networking standards
• IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g

Expansion / Connectivity

• Interfaces
• 3 x Hi-Speed USB – 4 pin USB Type A, 1 x Display / video – VGA – 15 pin HD D-Sub (HD-15), 1 x Headphones – Output – Mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm, 1 x Microphone – Input – Mini-phone 3.5 mm, 1 x Network – Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX – RJ-45

Power

• 5 Hours!!

Others

• Operating System / Software
• OS Provided
• Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
• Software
• Drivers & Utilities

My Take On the Asus

The original EEE PC reputedly ran only at 630 Mhz, but this one had all its adrenaline coursing through its metallic veins. The EEEPC 900 chugs along at 900Mhz, and coupled with an electronic SSD drive boosted by 2GB ram (from 1GB), it handles Windows XP Home very nicely. In fact, I found this supposedly pedestrian PC loading programs faster than my old 1.4Ghz Acer with a 7200RPM hardrive! MS Office, Firefox and the occasional quickbooks app fire up responsively and without lag even at shut down. This definitely results from the rapidfire SSD (that I bet shames most 7200RPM drives) and 2GB RAM.

I did some tweaking and eliminated the pagefile (virtual RAM) altogether to save the write cycles on my SSD. Woah- my EEEPC processes everything even faster now! With data kept in fast ram, its fast SSD drive appears to have gone all the more on steroids. This helps with most apps, except software like Photoshop which demands a pagefile. Oh and speaking of Photoshop- yep, this 900Mhz baby handles the image editing software like a dream.

It gets better. The 900 weighs just as nicely as the ole lightweight EEEPC 700. You won’t even know it’s in your bag. Plus, the battery goes up to 5 hours. I know- I checked!

There are a few downers of course. I can’t run 3D software like studio max or autocad. But who cares? There’s really no point suffering vector software on a tiny screen. I leave that to my 15 notebooks.

So is it worth the $500 price? Hell yeah! This is one alternative laptop that can do pretty much 70% of the daily tasks: surfing, office work and emailing.

Go grab one!

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