Customer Rating:  
Summary: eeePC901
Comment: We bought this product, with Wijndows XP, to use during travels. We like to connect to the internet while in airports. It is lightweight, for a computer and easy to use. We ar ehappy with it. It does NOT have a disk drive of any type so one needs to purchase an external drive to conect through a USB port. We also purchased a remote mouse which makes using it faster and easier. We bought a Microsoft optical mouse. Model 1056 which is lightweigh and connects through a flashcard plugged into a USB port.
The keys are small so high speed typing with big fingers is difficult. Smaller hands, with practice should have no problem
Customer Rating:
Summary: built by children?
Comment: The first one I got didn't work at all so Amazon replaced it promptly. Now, about a month later, the battery won't hold a charge at all. This has been a very disappointing experience.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Everything I wanted including HiDef camcorder backup
Comment: I have had my 901 for about a month now. It has the plusses and minuses others have discussed, so I won't bore you with repeating them here. I have the XP version. So far the 4GB C:\ drive has been large enough to hold Windows Home, with SP3 and patches since then. Currently there is about 500MB free space left on c:\. All my progrtams are installed on d:\, along with all document files. I have used the 901 to download full HiDef video from my Canon FX100 to my external hard drive (Western Digital Passport), using Canon supplied Pixella software. I use Quicken and many firewall, anti-virus, etc, all on the d:\ drive with no problems. In fact, since I will be on the road and have concerns about theft of this tiny computer, I run Quicken from a True Crypt volume.
I bought a 16GP SDHC card thinking I would use it with the 901. Since d:\ has plenty of space after loading the appications I want, I plan on using the card in my HD camcorder instead.
I bought a mini mouse - much easier than the touchpad (but this is true with any laptop touchpad IMHO).
I did encounter an install problem with Pixella (in Install Shield, error -5001). This has not been resolved. I got Pixella to work anyway by installing it on my other laptop and copying the .exe files to the 901. All other programs Install Shield operations were no problem. I also had a problem with the Java runtime appplet failing to launch properly. I uninstalled Java, cleaned up the registry, and on 8/23/08 downloaded Java again from their website. Works great now, with both IE7 and Foxfire. I have not yet been able to access the free YoStore web storage option; hopefully this can be corrected soon, or I can figure out what I am doing wrong. Overall I am extremely pleased with the computer. I will NOT be taking my 15" laptop on any more road trips!
Customer Rating:
Summary: I love my PC901, except one thing...
Comment: I have been using my company-issued HP laptop (very heavy and bulky), and although I have to take it with me when I have to access my company VPN, half the time I travel, I don't even need all that computing power, I just need a light little laptop for web surfing and VOIP application. I found EEE PC901 on Amazon, and I thought I found the perfect solution to my problem. So I ordered it immediately (not knowing that it had just came out to the market... I paid full $599, without discount...). When it arrived, I was totally amazed by how small this laptop was, and it was so, so light! My next business trip was a few days after I received my EEE PC, so I took my little EEE laptop with me.
I absolutely had no problem with anything. I found the keyboard to be almost too small, but after a few hours learned to type on this keyboard fairly well (the trick is not to let your thumb touch the touchpad... Of course you don't realize your thumb or palm is touching the touchpad, so your cursor seems to go jumping all over the place). Initially touchpad felt too sensitive and erratic, but the EEEuser forum pointed me to download the touchpad manufacturer's driver (called "smartpad") (http://www.elantech.com.tw/download.aspx), I've managed to download the touchpad driver from the site, and it is now working like a dream (with tons of multi-finger tricks), the battery life was much longer (I got average of 6-7 hours) than my HP (it only really lasts less than 3 hours, but rated 6 hrs), the machine didn't heat up as hot as my HP, bluetooth is working like a charm (with my mouse), and so is wireless network (never dropped a signal), the built-in webcam and microphone is fantastic for skype, the speakers are little cheap sounding but enough to hear the beep so who cares, and the processor it's gotten is fairly quick and it almost seems faster than the processor in my HP laptop... I guess the speed has a lot to do with the SSD...
But then... the problem started about two weeks ago, after I started to load a lot of crap. The "fast" SSD is 4GB on this thing, and slower SSD has 8GB. The fast SSD is assigned as the main disk "C" so all Windows files and a lot of the programs are in "C" drive. 4GB is barely enough to retain the configuration as it came from the factory, and not enough for adding something like MS Office even after OpenOffice and MS Works and all the other software that I don't use have been deleted. I had to install most of my programs to "D" and reassigned "My Document" folder to "D", and compress "C" drive to get about 1GB of free space. However, the precious free space on C drive is slowly but surely been eaten and now I see my free space on "C" as 700MB. I've upgraded my memory to 2GB (it was very, very easy I must say) and I don't have my swap file in C or system restore, and I don't keep trashed file, and my browser cache is minimal. But a lot of applets have been installed and a lot of application data are in "C", and that eats up HD space little by little. It's working fine so far, but the amount of free space on "C" is a constant worry when I use this little laptop.
While I do love this little guy and I really wanted to give this 5 stars in this review, the main drive is just too small for use with XP, and because of this reason, I cannot honestly say it's worth 5 stars... The EEEuser forum has a lot of recommendations about reducing the XP installation down to minimal using nLite (to something like 1.5GB), but that's not really what I want to do. Though I love this laptop, I don't want to spend too much time or effort trying to work this thing to optimum... I would have paid $100 or $200 more if the main SSD had one large-capacity SSD instead of cumbersome two physical volumes... Oh well, the laptop itself is cheap enough so I could buy another one when ASUS comes out with a laptop with one large capacity SSD (and I don't want an HDD. If I did, I'd buy PC1000H or Acer/MSI/HP and those are all bigger than 901)... Oh, and even though 1024x600 resolution does not cause any problem surfing the net, it would have been nice if the display actually had 1024x768pixels... If ASUS could fix these problems, then I will give it a five star and really, really love this thing. I've been recommending this little laptop to a lot of people, but I do tell them to wait, if they can. I think the idea of this super small laptop is so excellent, and I hope ASUS and other manufacturers would come out with more exciting and capable models (and keeping the same form factor and weight... The portability is the key here!!) in the future. Once those problems are solved (then non-computer-savvy people can use them without any problem), I think this product category will kill low-end large/bulky laptop market... but PC901 is not quite there yet for primetime...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Defective product
Comment: I've had this computer for two days. Up until now I was generally pleased with it except for the limited solid state C: drive size (4 gb). I am constantly having to clean up the files on the drive so I don't get low memory messages. They definitely need to upgrade the size of this drive.
However, the reason for the one star rating is a quality issue. One of the three USB ports doesn't work. When I called technical support, after waiting a very long time, the best solution the tech could suggest was to reload the operating system. This is after I have spent most of two days updating drivers, installing software, etc. He said he didn't really think it was very likely that would work anyway. If it doesn't, I have to call and get an RMA and pay to send the unit in to them. Who knows how long it will take to get it back?
I would not recommend that anyone buy this product due to quality issues.
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