Early Look At ASUS Eee PC 901 With Intel Atom CPU

Might E. Mouse writes "Reviews are hitting the net for the first Intel Atom-powered netbooks, and TrustedReviews has posted one for the ASUS Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition. Has ASUS won the Atom(ic) war before it even started? With features like Wireless-N and a 6600mAh battery good for four to seven hours, that might well be the case. TR rated it highly, but I'm going to wait for their MSI Wind review before making a purchase — their first look at the Wind showed a better keyboard and larger storage." An anonymous reader notes that despite the increased capabilities, the 901 debuts at a lower cost than its predecessor.

Re:1024x600? Eew....

[Breakfast Pants]

I reccommend the "Compact Menu" extension.

Re:Atom is ok. But, VIA Nano can run Crysis... :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah with a nVidia 8600GT graphics card, hardly what you'd want in a low power laptop. And the most relevant spec, power consumption, can't really be compared from the info in the wikipedia articles. Before saying one is better than the other how about some real world benchmarks for both systems on performance and power consumption.

Re:Sometimes I feel old...

[gbjbaanb]

but we've had multitasking since the pentium first appeared. Not only that, the Atom is a hyper-threaded CPU, so really you could say its designed for multi-tasking.

I think the point was that modern apps are so hungry for resources that you need lots of RAM and CPU, whereas we got the same stuff done with significantly less only a couple of years ago.

Re:settling dust - I'll wait a year

[bgfay]

I thought the same thing last year and then, when my folks, brother, and wife couldn't think of anything else to get me for Christmas, I suggested the Eee 701 8G. I got it on a whim, thinking it would be a good toy. And it is. But I was surprised by how much work I can do on the thing. Most of the time, it's my primary computer.

The keyboard takes a lot of knocks in reviews, but listen to the people who have had one for a while. I have meaty fingers and I can type fast on the thing. The screen is too small, but I hook up to a monitor when I'm home or at work and at other times use Firefox's fullscreen mode. It works.

As for waiting for the market to settle down, I get too excited for such a logical, well-reasoned approach. Besides, for five-hundred, I was willing to give it a shot. I'll probably grab a 901 for my 40th birthday and pass the 701 down to my six-year -old. She's already using it whenever I'm not on the thing.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't wait. If that's what you want to to do, go for it. But if you can get someone to let you borrow one for a few days (a week would be great) I bet you'll find you're ready to go.

Re:"A full school day"

[backpackcomputing]

You might want to consider the newest Eee PC, the 1000. It, like the MSI Wind, sports a 10 inch screen. But it also comes with either a 80 GB HDD or a 40 SSD. The 1000 was just released Taiwan a few days ago and hopefully should be stateside within a month or so. For more details checkout http://backpackcomputing.com/ [backpackcomputing.com]

Re:Why a VGA port?

[Cannelloni]

I havent used a VGA-compatible monitor in about 9 years. And ALL modern displays are 100 percent DVI.

Re:A ferrari to get to the store

[symbolset]

except I actually benefit from my toy whenever I do video processing or launch a few dozen VM's for application testing and network simulation.

It's amazing what you can do with a few of these [intel.com] (a hundred bucks at fry's) and some these [power-on.com], a few of these [newegg.com] and some creative sheet metal work on one of these [target.com].

You'll need a few other bits too. If you get carried away it would look something like this [helmer.sfe.se]. If you keep your wits nobody would know it from a typical filing cabinet except that instead of storing files it renders frames with 32 cores running at 2.6GHz or launches your precious VMs.

And you can still remote to it with your mini notebook from the beach.