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Mini Eee PC 900A Review

W

WobbleWobble

Diamond Member
I had my buddy bring back an Asus Eee PC 900A (1.6GHz Atom, 4GB SSD, 8.9" LCD, 1GB RAM) from Best Buy USA since they don't sell this in Canada, so I thought I'd write a little mini review on it.

The unit is nice and small. Keyboard is a bit cramped, but I guess it's fine for a netbook that size. Touchpad is responsive and does the job. The LED LCD is pretty nice! For $300, I must say I'm impressed. The unit runs very quiet and the build-quality is OK. Nothing great, but nothing to complain about either.

First thing is it's missing a webcam. The slot is there but it's covered up. There's also is no Bluetooth. I haven't really tested the battery life, but I would guess it would last 4 or so hours.

The built-in Xandros Linux OS is OK. Does the job well enough, but I thought I'd try to put Windows on it. I did a regular install using an external DVD drive and it installed fine, drivers are readily available on the Asus web site.

Performance was pretty poor, even with the 2GB RAM upgrade I did on it. It always seemed to choke when there was some I/O activity. Even doing simple things like loading up Windows Live Messenger with a bunch of contacts, it would just choke. I still haven't figured out why it's choking, but I've read that it has a very poor performing MLC SSD. The drive is NTFS formatted and I had the page file disabled due to lack of space. I'll continue troubleshooting Windows XP performance, but it looks like I might end up going back to Linux.

If anyone has any ideas on how to improve XP performance, please let me know.
 
The SSD is horrendously slow on the 900A. I'm not sure if you can upgrade it though. Check around the eee forums.

It'll be better with an nlited XP, but some intensive stuff you may see slowdown.
 
I saw that this weekend. Pretty darn good deal for $300. For what they are designed to do you can't ask for a whole lot more at that pricepoint.
 
Yes, this 900A model is only $300 but it has a pretty bad SSD. Here are my ATTO benchmarks from it.

Compare that to the benchmarks found on jkkmobile's site - http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/...d-and-write-tests.html

8MB/s compared to 31MB/s on the 901 4G SSD. If you want my recommendation, look at a different model. It's not really the fat of XP, the Atom is pretty speed and CPU utilization isn't that high nor is RAM usage (2GB in my machine). It's just that XP tends to write to the disk more often than Linux.

I'll continue to try other things in XP such as not using NTFS, removing any service that would lead to additional disk write, etc, but I'll probably end up returning this machine, buying a faster SSD, or living with the default Xandros install.
 
Would love to hear more.
Have been tempted to pick one of these Best Buy Asus' up ... or the Dell Mini since it is passively cooled.
 
Personally, if I were to pick up a model I'd spend a bit more and get the 900HA or something along that line.

But for those who are curious, the 900A is much more usable on XP with FAT32 instead of NTFS (even with timestamps disabled).
 
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