After watching the market of netbooks for more than a year, last month I purchased the ASUS Eee PC 1101. Now that it’s thoroughly broken in — thanks mostly to NaNoWriMo — I though I’d share my thoughts and opinions on this little machine.

Initial Observations

Similar to my reaction to those baby shoes at Foot Locker, my first thought was this mini-laptop’s diminutive size made it, well, cute. Though, it has a pretty bland design, but until my HP HDX16 I would never have said I even noticed those things in laptops and I still don’t particularly care. While I marveled at the small size and light weight, I was also somewhat intimidated by it’s obvious fragility. It also perturbed me that the inside is black, glossy plastic so it was quickly covered in my fingerprints and a layer of dust within moments of being opened for the first time. More importantly, it booted WinXP quickly and after installing JAWS, Office Ultimate, and Firefox was chugging along without any hiccups. All in all, it seemed to suit me just fine.

In Depth

Setup and Installation (Or: The Great Bloatware Removal Process)
The first real negative was noticeable very early on: this netbook is crammed with bloatware! Everything from a trail of Office Student and Norton to a bunch of random browser toolbars and media programs. I spent about three hours cleaning off the hard drive — which is a slightly inflated length of time because to ease the boredom of this cleanup process I watched a DVD of TNG. Installation of the programs I needed was pretty simple; I just copied all the installation discs to a thumb drive and loaded them all onto the Eee PC via that without a hitch. Well, JAWS was at first somewhat quirky in that it repeatedly requested to activate, but I don’t think that’s because of the method of installation so much as JAWS is crazy.

Up and Running
JAWS, Firefox, and Office had to be able to run simultaneously on this netbook for it to be functional for my needs and I was very happy to see them all load up smoothly and run without any hiccups. The netbook does take a bit to load webpages on the Internet, which I think is a byproduct of Firefox and it’s stupid resource consumption and the 1GB of RAM. It did stall out and freeze a few times, but I realized when I transferred my Firefox profile I’d forgotten to clear the cache and that solved all browser issues.

The keyboard was very difficult for me to get used to, which surprised me since it’s nearly a full-sized laptop keyboard. The right Shift key in particular gave me a lot of issues — it’s in the proper place, but smaller. Apparently I’m of a habit when typing that I hit the middle or more towards the right of it, so I was hitting the Up Arrow ALL THE TIME. I put a bump dot¹ on the key, which has somewhat helped me. The keys are just a bit shallower to press than a regular laptop, but that wasn’t much of an issue for me. However, if you really bang on them, it does give the impression that your finger might go through the entire computer.

The touchpad took me a bit to get used to. It’s basically a bunch of raised rubbery dots and I found my finger tends to stick a bit when trying to scroll. It also seems to have some issue noticing when your finger has been removed, the scrolling sometimes continues even when you intend it to stop. That could be more the touchpad’s software than the actual hardware, though. Or maybe it’s a common thing with these bumpy touchpads, I haven’t had another laptop with one so I can’t compare. The mouse button was actually more difficult to get used to. Instead of actual buttons for right and left, it’s a single swivel bar without any indication of a precise middle to differentiate between the two. I often find myself hitting not squarely enough to one side or the other and getting the wrong type of button action. It’s also a very shallow depression and very quiet, so it’s hard to know if you’ve really clicked something sometimes. It hasn’t driven me crazy enough to the point where I’ve resorted to a USB mouse, but I should also note I don’t use the mouse as much given my visual impairment.

It runs incredibly cool and quiet. I’ve not really sat with it directly on my lap, preferring a laptop pillow for ergonomic reasons, but I’ve had it run for several hours straight and not felt any level of uncomfortable heat from the keyboard or when picking it up. The fan is very quiet when it does turn on, which is sometimes shockingly often especially when the netbook seems to be “thinking” really hard. But as I said it’s incredibly quiet and is most noticeable when it turns on and really only if your hand happens to be by the vent. I never noticed the air coming from it to be of an uncomfortable temperature either. All good things.

The screen is bright and vibrant and just as clear and sharp as my desktop’s monitor. It’s glossy, though, which means it picks up glare. For me I can’t use it anywhere that it might reflect any type of light, which is why it had to be able to run JAWS for me. Because of this I can’t comment for those who aren’t light sensitive or legally blind.

Probably the best feature is its incredible battery life. I haven’t tried to leave it on for a full test, but the advertisement for it I believe boasted 11.5 hours. I doubt that, but still if it only managed six that would be more than enough for me. The first extensive use I had of the netbook was at the midnight kick-off for NaNoWriMo and after having it on continuously for three hours with Word, JAWS and Firefox all running, the battery still said I had another 5 hours to go! There are a bunch of things you can do to increase even that battery life, ASUS includes a whole power management thing which even allows you to under- or overclock the processor. I never bothered tinkering with it.

Concluding Thoughts

All in all, the netbook meets my needs. It’s light and has a long battery life and can manage to run the few programs I need without issue. I do wish the inside weren’t such a smudge magnet, but otherwise I have no complaints since fully setting up the machine. And for $290 shipped from Newegg, it was absolutely a steal!

1. Bump dots are rubbery plastic raised dots that can be stuck on things. I use them on my laptop keyboards to help locate the keys necessary to command JAWS because they’re not generally in the same place as a full keyboard.