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

I got an Asus EEE PC 900 for long trips overseas. It works really well. Its plenty rugged. It has enough space to hold some music as well as do all the communications chores while on the road. It has a large enough screen for my older eyes to read without extra prescriptions and yet it is small enough to work on a plane even when the person in the seat ahead is fully reclined. However, this is not a tool for doing video editting in the field or any other computationally intensive job. I like the Win XP version because I had test driven a Linux version with Windows emulator to run some special software that I use a lot - the true Win XP is far superior in this regard. This is a great product for straight-forward email and web browsing, but not so great for heavier chores (but then thats why heavy duty laptops exist).

The biggest drawback is the lack of an optical drive - you have to carry an external drive if you are going to need one.

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.

I travel a lot, usually on a motorcycle, and this has proven to be a compact (a necessity with the limited storage space afforded by saddlebags), reliable way to check e-mails, edit and store pictures, and keep expense records while on the road. I'll continue to use my desktop for gaming and editing video (WAY beyond the capabilities of the little ASUS) but I won't be away from home without the little white netbook.

Battery life is okay and the XP runs okay. This is not a desktop replacement and doing anything with it beyond internet/email use can't be expected to go well. For the price I would have paid extra and got a full blown notebook with bigger keyboard. If you have a very directed use of email, internet and very light word processing this might work.

this same machine is $279 else where Techno Intelligence must be ripping people off. The machines are great.