We just received the EEE-Pc, formerly known as the 1000H.  It got discontinued or replaced with this one, somewhat strangely known as the 1000H.  Don’t ask me - I’m a victim of what the vendor told me.

We have two EEE’s now; one with the stock Xandros and one with EEE-Ubuntu that I installed.  The nettops live in a loaner pool for my less sturdy coworkers who would prefer not to carry the weight of a regular laptop.  The verdict so far has been complete success.  Everyone who has seen these computers loves them.  No one has asked a single question about how to work them or what operating system this is.  In case they do, we decided to call it SLOS - the Secret Laptop Operating System.

We had to wait about thirty days extra for the XP version, possibly because it had to boot up first.   No, I’m kidding.   I have to remember to stop that.  Or not.

The unit arrived today and a coworker powered it up (batteries charged out of the box).  My expectation was that this unit would run slower because of the OS.  Unfortunately my expectations were exceeded… I had to walk back to my desk because I got tired of waiting for the unit to go through its Windows startup paces.

The reason for this is that linux comes preinstalled.  Windows comes preintalled, mostly.  It has to go through the regulation setup screens that every copy of XP uses.  It’s only a PITA during set up - this does not happen every time.

One we got past the ponderous setup routines, the nettop actually ran better than I thought it would.  Asus made the right move in throwing one gig of RAM at the OS.  I have no idea what, if anything, was done to XP for the EEE.  The unit has a 160g physical hard drive, as opposed to the 40g solid state drive that accompanies the linux version.  This was no doubt a smart move, considering the size of the OS and whatever else might wind up installed on it.

There are a boatload of application icons in the tray with the default start.  This bothers me, regardless of whether it’s on a desktop or laptop, so I got rid of some of them.  We won’t be using Bluetooth and Open Office doesn’t need to pre-start, among others.

I also have some default software and tweaks for XP.  Coming from the pre-Windows days, I learned how to make every cpu cycle count.  Here are a few speed tweaks that will help:

• reduce the display to 16 bit color (do you really need 32 bit color on a nettop?)
• adjust the processor for best performance (gets rid of some of the cpu-intensive eye candy)
• remove any wallpaper
• turn off Bluetooth

The following have been found to help in other areas - ymmv:

• turn off System Restore (we make clones or just don’t use it)
• install Hijack This and get rid of unnecessary autostarts (know what you’re doing first)-Messenger, etc
• install Revo Uninstaller and remove what we’re not going to use (Skype, Windows Live*)
• install SpybotS&D, CCleaner, Sumatra (PDF reader), DoPDF (PDF writer), Firefox+plugins (CLEO!)

The unit comes with ESET antivirus, which I have heard good things about but never tried.  Also in the tray are the audio manager (I don’t need my audio managed but I left it there), the Bluetooth indicator, the Super Hybrid Engine (voom-VOOM!) which manages resource usage, the graphics media accelerator driver (I hit EXIT), and the EEE-PC tray utility, which controls camera, bluetooth, display, and WLAN.

I don’t have wireless here so I haven’t tested it.  It has picked up a few neighborhood networks though.  The ethernet jack works beautifully though.  There are some articles on hooking up a USB modem to the EEE.  I have a Verizon 175 that works on my regular laptop, which I’ll probably be testing with this one too.  No reason to think it won’t perform.

In the hour that I’ve been working with it, it’s been fine.  It did hiccup once or twice while I was loading programs from a USB stick.  It said it was working but wasn’t displaying any progress.  I don’t know if this is a transfer issue or something else: I’ll keep my eye on it.

VERDICT:

Assuming the hiccup was a fluke, this is a fine device for what it is.   Remember that a nettop is not a full laptop.  It has way less horsepower, no optical drive (CD/DVD, a miniscule display) and it’s much lighter.  If this sounds like a good deal to you, buy one.  I prefer linux but that’s just me.  It does run faster under linux, fyi.

We’re still waiting on a pair of Dell Mini 9’s but they seem to be taking their time.   We should get them in time for the dual core Atom chips to be included in the next version (after we get them).

Feel free to ask questions or post comments.