Asus Eee PC 1001P: Our Favorite Netbook
by Vivek Gowri on March 16, 2010 11:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Asus Eee 1001P: Conclusion
The Asus Eee 1001P is an interesting product in that it seems to undermine the bread and butter of the Eee lineup—the 1005PE. The 1001P uses the same 1005 chassis, has identical hardware specs, a matte textured case that doesn't pick up fingerprints, and a better non-reflective display, all while costing significantly less. The only thing the 1001P gives up is a few hours of battery life. So what's the point of the 1005PE? Only Asus can answer that, though some users do prefer glossy screens and casing.
But beyond the 1001P's somewhat perplexing place in the Eee lineup, it's just a netbook. A well built and attractively styled netbook with a great LCD, good battery life, no major design flaws, and few minor faults, but a netbook nonetheless, and as with so many other netbook reviews, the main takeaway remains. They're the smallest, lightest, and cheapest portable computers that money can buy, but they're also dog slow and not particularly enjoyable to use.
If you're looking for a netbook, there is nothing to stop me from recommending the Eee 1001P, as it is a solid competitor on the netbook playing field. It definitely has its merits as a stylish and ultraportable mobile companion, and the display is really a high point of the design, due to the matte finish and good contrast ratio. At $329, it costs significantly less than the 1005PE and other Pine Trail netbooks like the HP Mini 210 and Toshiba NB305 while offering identical specs and a very similar user experience. Evaluated as a netbook and against other netbooks, the 1001P is one of the better all around values on the market.
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With the Eee PC 1001P, ASUS has earned another Editors' Choice award, and like the ASUS N61Jv it's a Silver Award. There are two reasons it doesn't earn Gold. First is the lack of HD video decoding support; watching YouTube and Hulu is a common enough task that we feel a Gold-level netbook needs better video decoding performance. The other reason isn't quite as critical, but we would prefer Windows 7 Home Premium over Win7 Starter—the inability to customize the desktop background in Starter is just silly. Can anyone get all that into a $330 netbook? Perhaps not, but it's what we want to see.
The final caveat is that you need to stop and ask yourself: do you want a netbook, or do you want to pay ~$100 more for an 11.6" CULV machine like the Acer Aspire 1410 or Gateway EC14? If your only concerns are price, size and battery life with no regards to performance, a netbook will do the job. With over twice the computing power, a much more livable WXGA screen resolution, 802.11n/Gigabit Ethernet, and not much in the way of a size, weight, or battery life penalty, it's hard not to recommend going the CULV route.
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Taft12 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Has anyone made a netbook since the Dell Mini 9 (owned and loved by me) that has no moving parts?This should be a design decision netbook makers should strive for, but I don't even know if anyone has even managed this feat since Dell did 1.5 years ago.
tlbj6142 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
"Honestly, I would rather have XP on a netbook—any netbook. Win7 Starter is annoying and unsightly when compared to the "full" version of Win7 Home Premium and shouldn't exist in any corner of the market with its lack of Aero and the ridiculousness of a fixed desktop background."Why does this bother so many people? With a 10" screen do you ever even see your background? I know on my 15" laptop, I never do.
Areo has a couple of nice features (alt-tab layered look), but most are annoying. Especially the blurry "see through" window borders.
The real advantage Win7 has over XP is readyboost support. A $20 USB makes a world of difference in performance. Even on a 64-bit dual-core machine with 4G of ram.
straubs - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I find the very suggestion that "memory over USB" is somehow faster than extremely fast DDR3 memory connected directly to the motherboard to be completely preposterous.SunSamurai - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - link
That is completely preposterous, so its a good thing no one in their right mind ever suggested that.Replace DDR3 with Hard Drive and thats what its for. It's suppose to supplement the hard drive to provide less thrashing the pagefile.
Its still crap, and all it is is a buzzword selling point for dbag sales people in the tech department to toss around at consumers. Its almost as bad at them adding dual-core Ghz speeds together to come up with 5Ghz when really selling a 2.5Ghz chip.
Toss these people in jail or fine them please!
nubie - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I think you completely misunderstood the point of readyboost.Flash ram has much lower latency than any physical medium (IE spinning disk)
Thus if you intelligently cache the OS and some apps to Flash you can mask HDD latency, and probably improve on hard disk caching by allowing flash cache.
Hard drive latencies have a large effect on lag issues in a low-ram computer.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 19, 2010 - link
Suppose that is a good point, has anyone tested Readyboost in Win7 to see if it is useful yet? I can't, I run Windows off an X25-M so I'm sure it is faster than a flash driveTaft12 - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
What bothers people is the unnecessary crippling and step backwards from the "antiquated" Windows XP. We should be moving forward, not backwards.Also, Readyboost was shown to provide almost no benefit except in contrived benchmarks back in the Vista days and I doubt things have changed since.
mschira - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
I am not giving away my eee 1000h,It has a nice factory build in button to overclock to 1.8Ghz - effectively the fastest Atom CPU around, and boy it needs every single Hz it can get.
Asus overclocks the CULV platform, why not Pineview?
2Ghz? where are you?
M.
synaesthetic - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
Using ASRock's OCTuner utility, I've seen people overclock the HP Mini 311 (N270, nvidia ION) to 2.4GHz stable without a serious impact on battery life (lose one hour at most).I still haven't seen anything to make me want any other netbook more than the HP Mini 311, purely due to the presence of ION and the ability to increase clock speed by 50%.
QuietOC - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link
This sounds like the best current netbook. I can't understand why anyone puts up with the garbage LCDs. I didn't know how good my 1000HA was until I got a 11" CULV. I agree the Atom should be clocked at 2GHz--which works on the Eee PC 1000 series. Intel actually does offer one Atom model rated for that speed but it is not Pineview.