Home > Consumer Reviews > ASUS Eee PC 900 8.9-Inch Netbook (Intel Mobile Processor, 1 GB RAM, 12 GB Solid State Drive, XP Home, 4 Cell Battery) Pearl White

This little gem has performed just as promised. It's pretty quick and frankly, XP is nice to work with again. Screen is bright and sharp, speed is certainly adequate. Main problem is just size of keyboard, but that comes with the territory. Just brush up on your two finger typing and you'll be fine. A great bargain.

Performance is great, just make sure to install XP on the 4gb partition
Mouse and keyboard specially are bit too small, but you'll get used to it. I recommend this for basic use and more, but if you are picky get the eeePC 901.

I recieved this computer. I got it started up and I love the setup for an ultra portable unit. The only problem is that the hard drive is not 12 GB its actually an 8 GB unit and a 4GB unit that are 2 seperate drives....so basically until I can find an external CD drive to see if it is even possible to reformat it ....into 1 drive,or if it is actually 2 seperate units and cannot be done. Also if you want to add more memory, unlike other computers, it will void the warrenty. I found this to be stupid, as I really wanted to put and extra 1gb in this unit without voiding my warrenty.

I've had a day or so to play with the EEE PC 900, and it's a little wonder. The larger display makes this far more useful than the earlier model. I'm really looking forward to carrying this tiny machine about rather than my much heavier main laptop.

I was interested in the concept of this device for a while, and with refurbished devices coming on the market (and a $50 coupon I received) I decided to go for it and get the device.

Let me start by saying that my understanding is a lot of these devices are begin refurbished because they were running Linux, and the refurbish is to put windows XP on the device. That is what I think happened with this device. The original description said Linux, but the device came with Windows XP.

What attracted me to the device was the fact it has solid state disks. This makes it very quiet (it only has a small fan for the CPU) and I think will make it robust (nothing moving but the keys). With a built in SD slot and a 2Gbyte SD card, I now have a 14 GByte device. You can't do video editing, but youtube works fine and for word processing/simple spreadsheets it seems to be fine. The small size is great.

However, this device is too small for Windows XP. The SSD memory layout is a 4 GByte and a 8 GByte drive, with Windows installed on the 4GByte drive. This is too small for Windows XP. I could not install SP3 without removing everything extraneous (including Microsoft Works) from the PC. Then I had problems installing the next round of fixes. The OS seemed to run fine, but it was proving to be a pain to put fixes on.

My solution was the Ubuntu Netbook Remix version of Linux (which I am using on the Eee 900 right now to write this review). It's Linux, so I have some anomalies to work out (getting the viewer of PDF's defaulting correctly in Firefox, etc.). But the install is very clean, it appears to be a pretty complete package and it works quite well. Still figuring out some Microsoft word/Openoffice issues, but it seems to let me at least edit word documents (if word can edit them afterwards is something I still need to play with).

The screen is a good size, the mousepad is good. The keyboard is not bad, I am going to have to see how it lasts, feels a little cheap.

So, if you are willing to run Linux (as I was), this is a good device, if you want to run Windows XP I would not recommend this device.