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Asus Eee PC 900

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 18th April 2008

Inside, Out

When we get down to the nitty-gritty hardware details, the Eee PC 900 is mostly unchanged from the original design, which is a bit of a shame if you ask us. The sheer variety and scope of the Eee PC 700 mods out there shows that there’s a clear demand for an Eee PC with Bluetooth or in-built card readers. It seems like Asus has missed a trick by not staking a claim on some the empty space in the Eee shell.

There has been one apparently important upgrade though – the memory. One of the first things that every smart Eee PC 700 owner did was upgrade their Eee from a lowly 512MB of RAM to a more impressive-sounding 1GB. Asus even came out and endorsed users doing this, saying it wouldn’t break the warranty. It’s something I did myself when I found a stick of laptop memory laying on the floor under a desk.

The question is though, what does this extra memory gain you in terms of noticeable performance? The sad reality is, as far as I can tell, not an awful lot. Shoving an extra RAM stick in there is a great way to improve the performance of your desktop machine, but for this customized OS there isn’t a noticeable benefit as far as we can see.

Maybe the RAM is worth its weight once you’ve got multiple processes running and a few dozen Firefox windows open, but if you find yourself doing that regularly then you’ve probably got the wrong laptop – that simply isn’t what the Eee was designed for in our opinion. Although, with that said, the extra memory is worth the effort if you’re running Windows XP because it’s a little more system demanding, but this is a theory we weren’t really able to test.


All in all then, the extra memory is a nice addition to the Eee PC 900 and it certainly won’t hurt your system at all. To be fair, it probably does give the system a little bit of a boost too – just don’t expect your Eee to suddenly become twice as fast just because it’s packing double the memory.

Since RAM is so cheap right now anyway, it seems more like Asus has flung the extra RAM in there in order to stop the Eee sounding so underpowered. You can’t really blame it for that decision.

Now, you may think that we’ve covered pretty much every single change and alteration that Asus has made to the Eee PC, but you’d be wrong – there’s one thing left over which we haven’t looked at quite yet and that’s battery life. The battery life is the turning point for a number of people looking at the Eee and while the two and a half to three hours of battery life (with WiFi off) is enough for some people, others find it awfully lacking.

To us, battery life is a bit of a non-issue. The entire point of the Eee PC is that it is small and lightweight. You could demand a larger battery, but you end up compromising on weight, so to us the battery life is a good balance between system longevity and system portability. We’d like to see longer battery life of course, but it’s not going to be practical without either increasing weight and/or price. What we find more intriguing is the power cable though – where the original Eee had just a simple, single cable, the Eee 900 now has a two part cable with a brick in the middle. It’s not really a hassle since the power brick is so small, but it’s an unusual addition that we’re waiting for an answer on from Asus.

Conclusion

The Eee PC 900 is an exciting little laptop on the surface but, when you break it down to the basics, it isn’t all that dissimilar to the original Eee PC – and that throws the whole thing into a state of confusion. What has the Eee PC 900 got going for it? Well, there’s more memory, more storage capacity and a larger screen. That’s it really and, while the trackpad is nice, it doesn’t anything fundamentally important to the Eee PC.

The key though is in the screen – it’s that which is the real deal clincher here and the extra screenage is a really important addition, making the Eee so much easier to use and so much more appealing. There’s also the matter of the processor to bear in mind – Asus has said it will be taking advantage of the new Atom CPUs when they become available. That’ll bring more speed and less power consumption to the Eee immediately. That means that if you’re really hungry for battery power and performance then you may be better off waiting, grabbing an Eee further down the line when Atom is unleashed later this year.

Of course, you could make that argument at any point in time – there’s always something bigger and better just around the corner and, after Atom is put forward there’ll probably be a new model coming straightaway.

That means you’re in the same position that I was personally in just a few months ago when I knew I’d love to grab myself an Eee PC, but Asus representatives told me that the 900 line was on its way – surely it was worth waiting? Yeah, it was – but I didn’t listen and bought an Eee PC 700 anyway. After thinking about that, I certainly don’t regret it and I’ll be keeping hold of my older model which has only slightly less functionality. Still, if you haven’t got an Eee and you’re in the market then this is definitely the cream of the crop right now and if you’re looking for a new ‘netbook’ then we can’t recommend the Eee PC 900 enough.

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• Unboxing the Asus Eee PC 900
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• Elonex preps sub-£100 Eee-alike
• Hacker ups Eee to 1.2GHz
• Getting the most out of your Eee PC
• Adding more storage to your Asus Eee PC
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