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87 of 87 found the following review helpful:
Elegant little travel companion Feb 12, 2010
By D. Bacon The overall build of this netbook feels very solid and keyboard is firm, no flex. I love this keyboard, touch typing is no problem. This is a very personal preference though; you should try out the keyboard on any netbook before you buy it.
Cover and palm rests have textured finish that hides fingerprints. My husband asked, "Is that carbon fiber?", and thought it looked cool. The textured surface also provides a better grip than a shiny surface.
The Synaptics trackpad works great. Two-finger scrolling works smoothly, which is good because the up/down keys on the keyboard are pretty small. I don't use the trackpad rocker button very much, I just use tap gestures to simulate the left and right button clicks.
I'm really glad I went for the matte non-glare screen. It is easier to read in less-than-ideal lighting conditions while traveling. The 10.1" screen is clear and sharp, and easy to read at 1024x600, no squinting. The screen swings back and down when open, so that it sits low; it's good to have a low profile when working on an airplane tray.
Windows 7 starter edition ran without lagging, but I can live without all the extras provided by Asus. So, having an extra upgrade license handy, I promptly did a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium on the C: partition, leaving the D: data partition, the ExpressGate partition, and the restore partition intact. I was able to download all necessary drivers and utilities from the Asus support website. Windows 7 Home Premium runs amazingly well with only 1 GB of ram! I'm going to wait and see if I really want to upgrade to 2 GB.
I was concerned that the wireless card was only 802.11g, and not 802.11n, but I really don't notice any difference when surfing the web. I was also concerned that the webcam was only 0.3 megapixel (640x480), but it looks fine and works well with Skype, as does the built-in microphone.
I agree with others that the connector on the A/C adapter is very thin, but it seems strong enough. I'd rather have the pin on the A/C adapter break (which I can replace for a few bucks) than the power receptacle on the motherboard.
When I'm working from home via VPN and Remote Desktop, I like to connect my netbook to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse, and wired ethernet. The EEE PC 1001p had no trouble with the 1280x1024 resolution on my monitor. The wired ethernet and USB keyboard work fine. Logitech doesn't provide a Windows 7 driver for my old bluetooth mouse, but I just put the netbook bluetooth into discovery mode and it found my mouse with no problem. Windows 7 had the bluetooth mouse drivers I needed built in.
I inserted a 256 MB SD card into the memory card slot and it was recognized instantly. I'm trying out the Windows Ready-Boost feature with this SD card, but since most of the things I do are not memory intensive (surfing the web, remote desktop, VNC), and it's a fairly small memory card, I haven't noticed much of a difference.
It would have been nice if Asus had included a neoprene slipcase for this netbook. I recommend the Case Logic VLS-110 Sleeve for 7-Inch to 10-Inch Netbooks.
The 1001p has everything I wanted in a netbook: good performance, a reasonable weight, nice screen and keyboard, slick design, and a great price.
50 of 52 found the following review helpful:
Excellent Quality! Surprising Features. Jan 26, 2010
By Ron Gonzalez I was absolutely surprised by how well fabricated this little netbook is.
The Quality is excellent, the keyboard, takes almost zero getting used to from a full size keyboard. I am typing this review from the unit itself, and I can type to 95% full speed.
Most surprising in order:
1. Speed! I wouldnt have imagined with a gig of ram and an N450 ATOM that windows 7 would run this fast. My wireless downloads come in as fast as my athlon multicore desktop. IE launches quickly, as well as other applications. Windows 7 Starter runs superbly. I don't imagine that a CAD CAM or any heavy duty graphical app will run fast on this at all but this is a netbook, and it is surprisingly snappy.
2. Component Quality: I was so happy to find that the touchpad is a synaptics brand touchpad, everyone knows that the synaptics touchpad is the best and the driver software allows you all the advanced touchpad features.
3. USB Ports: I can hookup a Smart Card Reader, a USB Logic Analyzer, and a 4gb Sandisk cruzer all at the same time. I imagine that if you owned a bluetooth mouse or a bluetooth smart phone you can also get that up and running simultaneously.
Overall, an amazingly capable netbook.
One more thing, the aesthetics were just what I was expecting, it is a sharp looking netbook.
Good Job asus, 5/5!
41 of 42 found the following review helpful:
Good until broken Jul 04, 2010
By SSS ASUS eee pc has everything I was looking for. Long battery life, light weight, cheap etc.
I have had a couple of problems that is worth sharing with other who are looking to purchase this.
1. The rebate is scam. I did not get my rebate despite filling up all forms properly, and sending them to right place. They first denied my rebate notifying me that the UPC does not match. I emailed them, and they told me to resend the documents to a different address. Next time, they denied notifying me that my paperworks were too late.
2. The battery life reduces much faster. It powered up around 9-hours initially (at nominal use), but within 1-year it is reduced to about 5-hours with the same work loads.
3. Mic died. The built in mic and speakers do not seem to be reliable. The mic does not work at all. I now need to carry an extra external mic if I plan to use it. I can't believe that the components are made of cheap materials that stops working in a short time.
4. Hard drive disk slow. Sometime it takes several seconds to execute an operation, if it needs to access the hard drive.
37 of 38 found the following review helpful:
Eye-Catching, All Day Netbook Jan 28, 2010
By Kevin E. Johnson I really like the Asus 1001p. I am typing this review on it and the non-"chiclet" keyboard feels big and spacious. Very easy to type on. I actually thought I'd miss the chiclet keyboard quite a bit, but nope. Not at all. All the keys seem to have great travel and feel sturdy, including F9 (which someone else mentioned. The "carbon fiber" treatment on the exterior shell is nice but not as readily visible as the photos on Amazon would have you to believe. It is actually quite a bit more subtle in real world lighting. It is nice though. This unit is slick. The carbon fiber look is also there on the palm rest, though not on the bottom. Screen is bright and crisp. I installed Hulu desktop and found that full screen video is choppy unless on the lowest quality setting. This might just be a result of the resources that the Hulu Desktop app is using since it requires 2GB RAM and I only have 1GB in my unit.
The hard drive comes pre-partioned into 2 local drives, C and D. C being 100GB and D being 122GB. Not a fan of this setup, but will go with it for now. I figured the Hard Drive would be partitioned since one of the advertised features is that by holding F9 during boot up you can reimage back to factory default. The unit came sort of no frills with only the battery, install CD, adapter, and warranty card in the box. Installing many programs on it under windows 7 starter has been a breeze so far.
One major gripe about the unit is that since it has such a heavy 6 cell battery that is all the way to the rear of the unit, I found the computer wanting to tilt backwards, its front feet lifting off my lap quite often, especially if the screen is pushed further away from you. This wasn't too big a deal if you have it on an absolutely flat surface, but I can see how if you are lap typing on this puppy that it would be an issue. The netbook is seriously weighted towards the rear hinge forcing you to cheat the screen angle forward in order to compensate. This gives you a slightly less viewable angle. Prior to purchasing the 1001p, I had taken a look at the HP Mini 210 and decided against it primarily because its 6 cell battery extends out and down from the rear hinge area. But now I see why their engineers chose this route, it forces the laptop back into a typeable position. I almost wouldn't mind that sort of a design now.
First full day of usage I got around 7 off/on hours of battery life with about 20% remaining. Not sure if I'll get close to the "asterix-promised" 11 hours of battery life as my battery meter seems to tell me it will be closer to 7-8 hours. I found that if you hit Fn + Spacebar, you can shuttle through the various Asus powersaving modes (S.H.E. - Google it). Only time will tell how much they add to system performance and battery life. Overall I'm pleased with the unit. My biggest gripes are the rear-weighted design and the pre-partitioned hard drive. Other than that, I think it's a fine machine. I found the trackpad to be zippy and quite responsive. I have yet to have any cursor-jumping issues. Plus the multitouch scrolling is as smooth as butter.
23 of 23 found the following review helpful:
5 Star Performance, but 4 Star Rating due to Lack of User Upgrade Options Mar 10, 2010
By MWebb 3/18/10 Edit:
This 1001p with the 250gb hard drive just got an "Editor's Choice" award from the Anandtech technology review blog - you can read the review here by substituting the usual . for DOT:
[...]
Anandtech echoes my concern that it is tough to upgrade anything on this Asus 1001p beyond memory (which is ridiculously easy to do), but they like everything else so much that I have upgraded my original review by one star (4 star to 5 star). Lest you think I am slavishly following Anantech's reviewer's lead, please note that Anandtech had the technical resources to check performance of the LCD monitor screen and run a host of benchmarks and the LCD screen performance simply blows away everything else out there while the benchmarks are mostly BETTER than the more expensive ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005PE-MU17-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook (Up to 11 Hours of Battery Life) - the contrast ratio on the 1001p LCD panel is superb (and it's the preferred matte finish). The one caveat is that their reviewer believes ASUS artificially throttles back the maximum screen brightness to save battery life - something I agree with. (There used to be a utility program to "uncork" the screen brightness on Asus netbooks, so at some point we may be able to regain the brightness.) I haven't had any problem with the current factory brightness level in a brightly lighted office, however.
Anandtech also praises the rigidity and quality of the construction of this Asus 1001p.
GIVEN THE DIFFICULTY IN UPGRADING THE HARD DRIVE on this Asus 1001p, be sure to order THIS ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1001P-PU17-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook (Up to 11 Hours of Battery Life) version with the 250 gb hard drive if you have a large music and/or video collection you want to haul around with you (the bargain priced 160 gb edition is plenty for almost all other purposes, however, if you are on a tight budget, and keep in mind it's not impossible to upgrade the hard drive, just harder than on some other netbooks like HP and Acer).
IF 48OP FULL-SCREEN HULU PLAYBACK IS IMPORTANT TO YOU, wait a few months more for some Asus edition with a Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator card or, better yet, with an Nvidia Ion 2 gpu (graphics chip processor) which should also have an HDMI out (this one doesn't) if you want to try driving your HDTV via a netbook.
The edition under review WILL play Hulu "in browser screen" at 360p resolution, which may be enough while you are on the road, and WILL play even 720p for DVD's you convert (via Handbrake and VLC, or in some cases via Windows Media Player or Quicktime). Also please note that Google and Apple are both pushing hard for HTML5 to be accepted as an alternative streaming video player to Flash, and I have, in fact, been able to run YouTube videos 480p fullscreen on this Asus by opting into the HTML5 beta test program at yahoo (youtubeDOTcom/html5).
Original review:
In some ways I like this netbook better than the HP Mini 210 which is my favorite, but the HP Mini 210 (and also the Acer ao532h) are much easier to upgrade.
Before you take this one star downgrade as a negative sufficient to scratch this netbook off your shopping list, PLEASE NOTE that a MEMORY upgrade is VERY simple since there IS a two-screw panel giving easy access to the 800 mhz memory module (you must use 800 mhz memory for an upgrade even though theoretically the N450 Atom processor in this and similar netbooks is supposed to run on 667 mhz memory - if you drop in 667 mhz memory it either won't run or you'll have buggy behavior - read one of the other reviews). This machine MAY require the 800 mhz memory to run in Super High Performance Mode accessible via Fn+spacebar, but I have not been able to confirm, details are hard to come by.
The overall performance, build, and quality of this netbook, are 5 star otherwise - the screen is sharp, glare free, has good contrast (Asus sometimes has the best contrast), and displays websites and videos with high quality. The keyboard is easy to use, but it requires a simultaneous Fn key press to access the common Page Up/Page Down commands. The top row function keys are a little hard to read. Skype worked fine with no speaker or microphone problems if you use the built-in speaker and microphone in "speakerphone" mode. Not too much bloatware. Easy to remove the "D" partition using the built-in tool in Win7 control panel.
GREAT PRICING - getting the upgraded Bluetooth/250gb "package" add less to the base $300 price than other makers. If you get the base $300 model, which is probably more than adequate for most users, you still get a good 6 cell battery unlike the HP Mini 210 which comes with a wimpy 3 cell. Do note, however, that I believe that Asus's unusually high battery life rating is based on their SHE (super hybrid engine) utility program which allows you to slow down the processor, which gives Asus an edge over other makers who merely dim the screen. Some online reviewers, notably at engadget, run battery tests and they are worth Googling if maximum battery life is essential for you. For me, 3-4 hours of full screen brightness, "Performance mode" watching videos (which is very power demanding) is plenty, and other than 3 cell netbooks all of them will deliver this much performance,
So why the 4 star rating? Two reasons. Except for memory, it's not easy to access the hard drive (to upgrade) or the PCI-e mini slot (to add a video accelerator). For that matter, since I can't get the back panel off, I'm not even sure there IS an open PCI-e mini slot - HP, Dell, Acer include one, but I know MSI often doesn't, and I haven't hear anything about Asus. If these types of do-it-yourself upgrades are important, stick with Acer or HP instead.
BTW, Asus has announced two models which will include the Broadcom Crystal HD video accelerator card for stutter free 480p full screen video; Acer has announced a budget priced Ion2 video powered netbook (ao532g) which will do the same. So if high rez streaming video is a must, wait for one of those models in a month or two. (High rez converted video, played using Windows Media Player or VLC, is not a problem, and playing DVD's via an external drive is not a problem either, the new N450/GMA 3150 netbooks can do those easily - but you are limited to 480p in full screen mode due to screen resolution limitations).
Finally, toggle the SHE function (Fn + space bar) and run your Asus 1001p in Super High Performance mode for the best performance. It is noticeably zippier than other makers in this mode.
If you have any questions, please comment and I will answer if I can.
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based on 89 reviews
Elegant little travel companion Feb 12, 2010
By D. Bacon
Good until broken Jul 04, 2010
By SSS
