Laptop Reviews

Asus is a leading computer incorporation, which is a Taiwanese multinational company, a leading manufacturer of computers, laptops and computer accessories. Asus appears in Business week’s “InfoTech 100” and “Asia’ top 10 IT companies” rankings. Asus’s Eee  PC laptops category were a super hit and that fact has proved to be true again with its Eee PC 1000HE.

The Asus Eee PC 1000HE is a slightly tweaked version of its predecessor, the Asus Eee PC 1000H. And the last letter ‘E’ in the name stands for the term “Extension”, which in turn refers to the highly improved battery life of 9.5 hours. The other new things that this Laptop has come up with is a new Intel Atom N280 Processor, a brand new style of keyboard with isolated keys and a few more tweaks that would make the device a much more faster and an easier device to use rather than the other equivalent notebooks.  One more change that is significant and worth mentioning is the inclusion of a faster 667MHz front side bus that aids in increasing the core clock to 1.67GHz, up from the 1.6GHz that was available in Atom N270.

Asus Eee PC 1000HE Laptop gives you the freedom of leaving behind your AC adaptor at home, by blitzing past seven hours when used with Wi-Fi and touching past the nine hour mark, without and wireless connectivity, this netbook has a battery life that would put the other netbooks of twice its price to shame. Having got a great deal of upgrades in the fields of display size, storage capacity, processing power, wireless capabilities and battery life, have all make the Asus Eee PC 1000HE NetBook, steel the sales of the other fully featured netbooks.

Attractively designed:

Design wise, the Asus Eee PC 1000HE looks virtually identical to its predecessor, the 1000 series netbooks and that is not something to be complained about. It is an extremely attractive device with gentle and curved edges with circular and glossy black casing offset by classy silver hinges. The display bezels is also having a glossy finish now. The “Eee” brand name is on the corner of the lid with a minimalist look. As a review team, we just cannot stand the finger prints that a glossy surface picks up. Asus could have given some other finish and reduced the size of the bezel and increased the screen size to just 11 inches. But we do not consider these as big issues and they are very minor ones. This Asus Eee PC 1000HE model is available in pearl white, black, blue and golden colours.

Chunky though:

Though the built quality of the nettop is quite good, it is heavier than some of the other nettop models weighing about 3.2 pounds and measuring about 1.4 inches in its thickest point. Where as, similar models like Samsung NC10 and Acer Aspire One weigh just 2.8 pounds each and are thinner at 1.3″ and 1.2″ respectively. Though the difference is not much, it is better that Asus gives importance to these small areas too in the future models. On a good note, Asus has streamlined the design of 1000 series by chipping off the bulge in the bottom of the system giving it a smoother and slimmer look. And the best part of the design is the availability of an easy access panel on order to replace the hard drive and to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, if you choose to do so. This is a great idea as some of the other popular nettop brands in the market are not upgrade friendly.

Huge difference in the keyboard:

The first major improvement that can be noticed with the design of the nettop is its new keyboard, which seems to have taken inspiration from the Sony Viao TT and the Apple MacBook. One of the most common complaints that persisted about the Eee PC models was that their keyboard was poorly designed along with the biggest offense of misplacing the right shift key. The 1000H had the keyboard which exhibited some flex and noisiness. Thankfully, Asus has addressed some of the mentioned issues in 1000HE.

The chiclet style keyboard can be seen in all of the Apple’s Macbook line-up. The keyboard features isolated keys, each key having a distance of 2mm to 3mm from its adjacent keys. This kind of an arrangement makes the keyboard even more easy to use when compared to the standard netbook keyboards, whose keys tend to be very close to each other. Touch typing is very much possible and the mouse track pad is also larger than the ones found in the other nettops. It is very pleasant to use and also sports multi-touch gesture inputs. Asus claims that 1000HE’s keyboard is 92% as large as full size keyboard and this number might sound familiar to you as it is the same magic number that is trumpeted by HP and Dell for their respective 10″ netbooks.

The multi touch trackpad:

The multi touch trackpad, as in the case of the keyboard, will seem to be very familiar to the MacBook and iPhone users, the Double and triple finger taps emulates secondary mouse buttons and two finger swipes scroll vertically and horizontally and three finger swipes to summon windows explorer or task switcher. You also have the very amusing pinch to zoom in or zoom out, rotate an image by moving your fingers in a circle and so on. On the down side, there is a high degree of flex under the keyboard and the entire keyboard does not feel tight as you would want it to be. It was too plastic, which the glossy black finish and the inlaid speckle pattern failed to cover up.

Shortcut buttons:

Just above the main keyboard, you will find four narrow silver shortcut buttons, out of which, one instantly deactivates the screen backlight, which is not of much use. It can be used only when you are desperately trying to hide something from someone behind your shoulders. The other three shortcuts seem to be even more useful, one of them zooms the screen by toggling between the display resolution settings and the other two are user programmable and hence you can always assign them to launch your favourite application.

Ports, Speakers and Webcam:

The ports have been arranged in a orderly manner. The left side of the Asus Eee PC 1000HE Laptop Computer has the Ethernet port, USB port, microphone and headphone ports. And the right side of the nettop houses two additional USB ports and a SD card, Multimedia card reader. You will not be able to find any optical drives, digital video outputs or fingerprint readers and of course that is why this device is called a nettop. The speakers of 1000HE delivered a pretty good volume without sounding harsh. The webcam is of 1.3 mega pixel resolution. It delivers a clear picture, the colours are accurate and the sound is crisp in both the directions.

Display as bright as the sun light:

As we had mentioned in the design section, Asus Eee PC 1000HE retains the 10″ display found in 1000H. The display has its native resolution to be 1,024×600 pixels which is relatively very good. The backlit LED display is extremely bright that it has to be reduced by a little to enable comfortable viewing. One of the screen settings allows you to set the display to a compressed 1024 x 768 pixels to enable viewing of larger applications and with this setting, you will still be able to see the start menu, task bar and the OK and Cancel buttons of a very large dialog box too. The horizontal viewing angle is good enough for you and your friend to sit next to each other and watch a movie comfortably. Since the display has not got any glossy coating over it, it can be used outdoors in direct sunlight without disappointing you be turning into a mirror.

Basic features of Asus Eee PC 1000HE:

Asus Eee PC 1000HE is one of the first few machines to have opted to use the Atom N280 CPU, which offers a better performance than the near-ubiquitous Atom N270 chips, that is currently employed in most of the recent generation nettops. This is complimented by the faster front side bus and a higher clock speed. The Atom N280’s front side bus is a system that transfers data between the memory sub-system and the CPU. And as we had mentioned earlier, it runs at 667MHz, as opposed to 533MHz in the case of the N270. This in turn boosts the clock speed to 1.66GHz, which is 600MHz faster than that of the N270. But with all these changes you cannot expect a massive improvement in the performance as the nettop makes use of the same Intel 945GSE chipset that was used in the previous generation Eee Pcs. Another important thing that affects the performance, included in 1000HE is the Atom-specific GN40 chipset, which is not new, but a faster performing element that was announced at the same time as the Atom N280 was announced.

Hard drive and RAM:

The Asus Eee PC 1000HE Laptop PC sports 1GB RAM which is quite standard with the nettops but then, upgrade kicks-in in form of a massive 160GB hard dive rather than the 80GB hard drive that could be found in the Asus Eee PC 1000H. The 160GB hard drive is on courtesy of a snappy Seagate drive with a spindle speed of 5400rpm. The hard drive is available as a single large panel in the underbelly of the hard drive providing instant access to the hard drive and the RAM. Additionally, this 160GB storage is complimented by 10GB allocation on Asus Eee Storage online service, a combination with which they can get a capacity of 170GB of Hybrid storage. The Eee storage works by integrating into windows explorer with the support for drag and drop operations plus private and shared folders. This specification might be pleasing to most of  you out there as this device is now capable of storing 230 standard definition movies, about 40,000 mp3 songs, and not to mention the luxurious number of images that can be stored.

Additional utilities:

In order to make use of the storage capabilities, you have to download the Eee Storage 2.0 software which would refuse to work until Windows .Net Framework 2.0 is installed. Though this in not something very huge to worry about, as it would be mostly installed as a part of Windows XP SP3 OS, Asus has to remove this hurdle for the sake of its consumers. Asus has also included a few other utilities into 1000HE. The Boot Booster hastens the start-up time to less than 10 seconds and the InstantKey software lets you assign applications to two user customisable keys which sit above the first bunch of Function keys.

Wireless features and Operating System:

The wireless features of the nettop remains to be the same as on the other models of the 1000 series. Since Asus Eee PC 1000HE supports the 802.11a/g/n compatibility, it connects to any WiFi network though it lacks integrated 3G. Bluetooth is also available and hence, you can easily transfer data between Bluetooth-enabled devices’ and brings forth excellent connectivity. Hence, if you want to surf the web when not in a WiFi hotspot, you have to connect to an internet enabled mobile phone or a better option is to get a USB modem.

The choice of Operating System that is offered for Asus Eee PC 1000HE is Windows XP. Asus has not offered any Linux options with this particular type of chassis and battery, yet nothing stops the fans of penguin from installing Linux at their own convenience.

The Super Hybrid Engine:

The Super Hybrid Engine of Asus Eee PC 1000HE allows you to vary the clock speed of the processor through a series of four pre set configurations. Each of these settings had a dynamic range of frequencies which the 1000HE can step through depending on its work load. The “Super performance” setting boosts the performance of the processor’s FSB from the native 667MHz to 700MHz and hence the chip soars up to 1.8GHz. The super performance is the default mode when the AC power is connected, and it makes the nettop a little noisy. When switched to “High Performance”, it certainly quietens things. The atom falls back to 667MHz and to 1.67GHz clock speed. In both the super and high performance profiles, the atom can spin down to 1GHz. Then, to have the maximum battery life, make use of the “Power Saving mode” which drops the bus speed to 500MHz which in turn winds back the processor’s speed to 1.25GHz, and the chip can also scale back to a mere 750MHz when there is minimal activity. There is an auto setting that toggles between the power saving mode when the 1000HE is running on battery and high performance when the AC adaptor is plugged in.

The massive Battery capacity:

Finally, talking about the star feature of the nettop which is its battery, it is of the highest capacity of any Eee PC. The 1000HE sports the 8,700mAh battery absolutely dwarfs the 6,600mAh cell in the previous 1000-series Eee PCs. When subjected to intensive battery hammering test with wireless activated, full screen brightness, and full on constant read and writes, the hard drive manages to have an astonishing 4.5 hours where as, most of the other net tops when subjected to same test manages to last only for two to three hours. Next, when the screen brightness is set to 60%, Asus’s Super Hybrid Engine Utility set the nettop to power saving mode. And then, when the wireless is left running, having simple tasks done, the device lasts for just over seven hours. When the 1000HE is set on power saving mode and wireless disabled, it gives over nine hours of non stop battery life.

The battery employed in 1000HE has 30% greater capacity than its previous six celled 6600mAh batteries and has twice the capacity of the competing six cell slabs. Yet, you will not be able to witness any awkward bulges out of the chassis as the device is built around a six-cell battery as a standard component, which has been neatly integrated into the design. The battery is a lithium ion pack that seems to be only a fraction bigger than the four cell bundle of Dell’s Mini 9, and as in the case of many of the other nettops, it occupies the central void of the hinge between chassis and display.

Performance:

The Atom N280 CPU of the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is slightly quicker than the N270. But this slight difference does not manifest much in day to day use as the original models of the 1000 series were pretty nippy. The swift boot time of 1000HE is particularly very impressive as it starts up windows XP in just 37 seconds, which is about 20 seconds below the average value of a netbook. Overall, the performance of Asus Eee PC 1000HE is pretty commanding.

Software bundle:

In addition to ASUS’ own Super Hybrid Engine software for overclocking or underclocking the 1000HE, the system comes with the StarOffice productivity suite, which is a good Microsoft Office alternative and Skype.

Warranty and support:

Asus backs the netbook with a standard one-year warranty and 24/7 toll-free tech support.

Verdict:

Asus Eee PC 1000HE Wireless Laptop is the best choice for the people who travel often and its stunning battery life seems to eclipse all of the other rival nettop options. It offers one of the best values in notebooks around. It features a vastly improved keyboard, track pad and touch buttons and they seemed to be currently the best one among the systems of its class. However, if you are ready to put in some more cash, then you could choose the more expensive Samsung NC10 and HP Mini 2140, which have lighter design and better keyboards. And in case you are not that particular about the battery life and looking for a cheaper option, the 10″ Acer Aspire One is good too. Asus Eee PC 1000HE nettop offers the best combination of value, performance and endurance.

Technical Specifications, Configuration Details of Asus Eee PC 1000HE

Manufacturer	Asus
Model Name	Asus Eee PC 1000HE
PC type	Nettop
Series	Eee PC 1000
DIMENSIONS AND DISPLAY
Dimensions (W x H x D)	266 x 38 x 191mm
Weight	1.4 kg
Available colours	Black, pearl white, blue and golden
Display type	LED Backlight WSVGA screen
Display size	10.1″
Display resolution	1024 x 600 pixels
PROCESSOR, MEMORY, STORAGE
Processor type	Atom N280
Clock speed	1.66 GHz
Processor manufacturer	Intel
FSB	667MHz
Chipset	Intel 945GSE
RAM installed	1024 MB (1GB)
RAM type	667MHz DDR2 RAM
Hard drive capacity	160GB
Spindle speed	5400rpm
Optical drive	None
Additional storage	10GB Eee PC Storage
GRAPHICS AND SOUND
Installed Graphics Type	Onboard Graphics
Graphics processor	Intel GMA 950
Speaker Details	Hi-Definition Audio CODEC Stereo speaker Digital Array Mic
Audio processing	Realtek HD audio with dobly home theater
COMMUNICATION FEATURES
Ethernet	10/100 fast Ethernet
Modem	N/A
Wireless	WLAN 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth2.1 + EDR
Mobile internet	None
Webcam	1.3 mega pixel
CONNECTIVITY	1 x VGA Port (D-sub 15-pin for external monitor) 3 x USB 2.0 1 x LAN RJ-45 2 x Audio Jack (Head Phone / Mic-in) Card Reader: MMC/ SD(SDHC)
SOFTWARE
Operating System	Windows XP
Office package	Star office 8
Other software	Windows Live Suite, Skype, Inter Video Win DVD, Windows live suite, Asus Super Hybrid engine
BATTERY
Battery technology	Li-ion
Battery capacity	8700 mAh
Number of batteries supplied	1
Estimated battery life (mfr)	9.5 hours
MISCELLANEOUS
Accessories	Slip case
Security	Lock slot
WARRANTY AND SERVICE	One year collect and return 24×7 toll free service support