ASUS Eee PC 1005HA: Refining the Netbook
by Jarred Walton on August 20, 2009 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
You Say You Want an Evolution…
After putting the ASUS 1005HA through a bunch of tests, we're happy to report that there are some tangible gains in battery life relative to the previous 1000HE. Other than that, there's not much to differentiate the two models. That in a nutshell describes much of the netbook market: all of the various products are extremely similar in terms of features and specifications. The only real differences are often more subjective, but keyboards, touch pads, and LCDs can still make or break a product.
When we compared the ASUS 1000HE with the MSI Wind U123, in some ways the U123 was a superior product. For the same price users received a larger capacity battery that resulted in roughly 40% more battery life, and they didn't even increase weight by a noticeable amount. Outside of battery life, however, we felt that the keyboard and especially the touchpad were better on the ASUS 1000HE. So how does the 1005HA compare?
The keyboard remains the same as far as we can tell, and that's a good thing. The 1005HA keyboard gave us no complaints. The touchpad is a bit trickier. We didn't have any serious issues, but we routinely activated the touchpad shortcuts for scrolling unintentionally. You can always disable those actions, but we feel their benefits outweigh the occasional errant activation. The longer we used the 1005HA, the more comfortable we became with the touchpad. Overall then, we'd rate that 1005HA as being equal to the 1000HE/1000HA in the ergonomics department.
Subjectively, you know the netbook is slow as soon as you start using it (unless you're coming from a pre-2004 laptop or something without enough RAM). Launching Internet Explorer (or Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari for that matter) takes noticeably longer. Opening and rendering web pages takes noticeably longer. Interacting with Windows in general is far more sluggish. The detailed PCMark05 explain in numbers exactly what you'll experience with a netbook. An entry-level $500 laptop is about 50% faster at rendering simple web pages (and the difference increases with lots of Flash content). Loading Microsoft Office is similar in that the initial start times are slower and menus and dialogs are less responsive in terms of popping up. If you have a task start using a lot of CPU time, the pauses become far more common and distracting -- in other words, heavy multitasking isn't a good idea.
Does any of this make netbooks a horrible platform? Is it too much or just something you notice when you come from a faster system? Relative to a modern desktop, a netbook is going to feel painfully slow at times, but for $300-$375 and a lightweight portable we don't think it's a bad trade. Don't run tons of web pages in tabs, don't open eighteen applications at once, and you'll be fine. The performance charts really tell the story: netbooks like the 1005HA are slow, but they're still "fast enough". Sometimes that's all you really need.
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The most annoying aspect continues to be the low resolution LCD. The contrast ratio is great and it's at its best in movies; everywhere else could definitely benefit from a larger, higher resolution LCD. However, it will suffice for normal office use. Most web pages aren't designed for optimal viewing on a 1024x600 LCD panel - the majority of sites don't have a problem with the width, but the height is a real issue so expect to do a lot of scrolling. By the time you add the title bar, menus, tabs, address bar, status bar and task bar together, you're looking at about 1/3 of the vertical space without any useful material! Combine that with site banners and other content and you may not even get to the core of a website without scrolling down. That's why the touchpad gestures are useful, because you'll do a lot of scrolling on any netbook.
Incidentally, if you're looking for a minimalist browser, Google Chrome wins with only 83 pixels of vertical real-estate at the top (compared to 130 for Safari 4, 118 for Opera 9/10, 113 for Firefox 3.5, and 96 for IE8 -- click the above image for a full-size view). That's using default settings, of course, and it's possible to shrink down the vertical footprint of other browsers. The core problem of not having enough vertical viewing space remains, however, and fixing that issue isn't a simple solution. For example, the old 5:4 and 4:3 LCDs were nice on vertical viewing space, but they're not as nice for widescreen movies. Still, 1366x768 or 1280x800 LCDs would be a welcome addition for netbooks (and it's something already being addressed with other models).We mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: one of the changes made from the 1000HE is that it's now much more difficult to access the hard drive. Users looking to upgrade to an SSD might prefer the old models, which appear to be selling at slightly discounted prices. On the other hand, the old models also offered lower battery life, so you have to pick your poison. Personally, the thought of adding a relatively expensive SSD to an inexpensive netbook doesn't make a lot of sense. Hard drive access will certainly improve, but the bigger bottleneck is usually the slow Intel Atom processor. You might also consider upgrading the memory to 2GB (around $30).
Once you start looking at upgrades, however, the attractiveness of netbooks starts to fade. In fact, the only reason to stick with a netbook at that point is because you really want the long battery life. Our performance results included a $500 notebook that runs circles around any netbook in every category… except size, weight, and battery life. Certainly notebooks are far more versatile than netbooks, and we really don't recommend anyone plan to use a netbook as their sole computer system. They're great for a small portable computer that you can easily carry around all day, take some notes, surf the web, etc. As soon as you try to do something more taxing -- moderate gaming, HD videos, or even in general use -- the performance benefits of entry-level laptops are readily apparent.
Our advice is to use a netbook as your second or third PC. They fill that role very well, and with a price tag of under $400 they are very affordable compared to high-end CPUs and graphics cards. If you're like us, you already have a powerful desktop you can use at home, and you might have a reasonably powerful laptop/notebook. What you likely don't have is a three pound computer that you can use all day long without the need to recharge. If you're in the market for such a computer, netbooks are a perfect fit. They won't be everything to everyone, but they definitely fill an important niche. ASUS continues to lead among netbook manufacturers, which is fitting considering they started the market a couple years back. The 1005HA may not be a revolutionary product, but it evolves the netbook just enough to make it worthwhile.
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Mugur - Friday, August 21, 2009 - link
I have an Acer Aspire One 150 from last year (N270, 1.5 GB RAM, 120GB harddisk) and I must say that the "slowness" is far less noticed than some may think. I tested with XP Pro, Vista Ultimate and now I have Windows 7 Ultimate RC on it. If you keep it clean and with some trivial optimizations (turn off system restore etc.) it performs fairly nice on tasks like browsing, Office, even movies.Some "myths" like not supporting Aero, or 720p video are false. It plays nice with Aero and using Vista's or 7 included video drivers I can play 720p with no dropped frames up to a certain bitrate. I tested with the wmv 720p clips from MS site and also with x264 encoded MKV files - the catch is to use Media Player Classic and CoreAVC codec (smt support). Files around 1 GB for a TV show (40 minutes) or up to 4-6 GB for a full length movie are 100% playable.
I have also an old CeleronM 1.73 Ghz notebook with 2 GB RAM and 120 GB 7200rpm hdd and, side by side, the Atom doesn't feel slower. The benchmarks are "true", but I think that they are not painting the real picture: for light tasks and with a "clean" OS and not a bunch of start up applications :-) netbooks are perfectly usable.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 21, 2009 - link
You are apparently correct; CoreAVC ($15) allows you to decode x264 720p videos. CPU usage looks to be around 70%, give or take. I'll run the battery test to see how it fares under that load and update the text.Codesmith - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - link
At your desk you hook it up to a 24" LCD, POWERED usb hub that connects to an external optical drive, keyboards, mouse, printer, and plug it into your speakers and you are good to go.When you are not at your desk its small, lightweight and has insane battery life.
Even though I have a powerful gaming desktop and a 13" Macbook I loved the netbook, I just can't justify the purchase.
If I was a student, or traveled a lot I'd buy one in a heart beat.
ashegam - Friday, August 21, 2009 - link
regarding the browser size comparison (dots)you can rearrange firfox to display your buttons, File menu and address bar all in one line (bar). Add "addblock" to it you should have the most browsing real estate then all the other browsers.
JarredWalton - Friday, August 21, 2009 - link
With the customizations you mention and with "small icons", Firefox is still *slightly* larger than Chrome. But I do like having menus. Of course I was going off of default settings, and AdBlock is an add-on... going there would open up a large can of worms. The basic comments still stand, however: the 600 pixel height is a real issue with netbooks and web pages. Honestly, even 768 or 800 is too short. It's on reason I miss the old 5:4 1280x1024 displays.GeorgeH - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - link
This review suffers from the same thing 95% of Atom/Ion/Nano and other low-end performance reviews suffer from: too many benchmarks and not enough subjective impressions.I already know it's pitifully slow. I already know it can't do HD video. I already know it can't game. What I don't know is how painful it is to use doing the basic tasks it was designed for, and when it starts to choke and become annoying.
This criticism isn't as critical for Netbooks, but if you ever do a Nettop review (especially for one designed as an office light-use low-power desktop replacement) subjective usage impressions under different types of typical workloads would be orders of magnitude more helpful than yet more graphs.
bigkah624 - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - link
Ditto what GeorgeH said. A netbook is for easy portable net browsing and document-editing on a usable screen. If you want a powerful netbook, then pay for it. Dont expect to spend sub-$400 (not yet anyway) and still expect all the sweet things most commenters are asking for here. If you want a powerful little box, go look at Sony's VAIO TT. And yes, expect to pay for it. Dearly.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - link
George, when we don't run the additional tests, people complain. Your own statement already sums up the situation: it's pitifully slow... compared to any modern PC. These netbooks are as fast as single-core 1.2GHz Pentium M Centrino laptops from about 2003. Plenty of people still use such laptops for office tasks, though.Subjectively, you *know* the netbook is slow when you use it. Launching Internet Explorer (or Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Safari for that matter) takes noticeably longer. Opening and rendering web pages takes noticeably longer. Interacting with Windows in general is far more sluggish. I included the detailed PCMark05 results for a reason, because they explain in numbers exactly what you'll experience with a netbook. An entry-level $500 laptop is about 50% faster at rendering *simple* web pages. Loading up AnandTech.com in IE takes around 3.5 seconds per page compared to 2-2.5 seconds. MS Office will load slower and take a bit before you feel it reaches full responsiveness (maybe 10 seconds or so).
Does any of that qualify as choking and being annoying? Relative to a really fast system, perhaps, but for $300-$375 I don't think so. Don't run tons of web pages in tabs, don't open eighteen applications at once, and you'll be fine. I don't know what you want me to say subjectively that isn't already conveyed by the performance charts. It's slow, but it's "fast enough".
The most annoying aspect for me continues to be the low resolution LCD. It's at its best in movies, and everywhere else I wish I had a larger, higher resolution LCD. However, it will suffice for normal office use. Note also that most web pages aren't designed for optimal viewing on a 1024x600 LCD panel - the majority don't have a problem with the width, but the height is a real issue so expect to do a lot of scrolling. IE8 (or Firefox) with the address bar, menu, tabs, and status bar uses 150 pixels. The task bar is another 30 or so (unless you hide it). That's one third of the vertical space without any useful content! Most web sites then put a ~130 pixel site banner at the top, and perhaps some other stuff. For instance, our site is 330 pixels before you even see the articles on the home page and 600 pixels to the article text when reading an article. It's why the touchpad gestures are useful, because you'll do a lot of scrolling.
Hope that helps... maybe I'll update the conclusion.
GeorgeH - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - link
That helps. Part of the problem is that in the past 4+ years I haven't spent any real time with anything much slower than a high end Prescott, so I have a hard time visualizing what scores as low as the Atom's really mean or "feel like" in practice.After thinking about it more, I guess I'm really asking what types of users and what types of tasks you think Atom/Nano platforms would be acceptable for, purely from a performance perspective and beyond the obvious ones such as a 12th PC or simple fileserver. I realize that's a very difficult and highly subjective question to answer, but that's why you get the big fat paycheck, right? ;)
One scenario that might help explain what I'm trying to get at:
Imagine yourself as the head of IT for a large, multinational corporation (one that only uses mainstream applications.) The CEO wants to "Go Green" and replace as many PCs as possible with low power Atom/Nano boxes without negatively impacting productivity or morale. How many new PCs do you buy (if any), and for whom?
yyrkoon - Thursday, August 20, 2009 - link
Well, I know you did not address me, but I would like to add on things that I feel Jarred left out.First, I have helped a couple of friends do the initial OEM setup on XP netbooks, and they are dog slow. Boot up on these Dell netbooks takes what seems like forever, just to enter into the the welcome/setup screen. Probably around 1.5-2 minutes for first boot. Then going through the different setup pages for the various things such as computername, and network setup are very sluggish compared to say a doing the same on a Pentium 4 onward. Honestly, I have installed XP Pro on a PII 300 with 384 MB of RAM, and I do not think it was this slow( it was a few years ago ). This I would have to assume would have to do with HDD speeds but I am not 100% sure. In relation again to your Prescott onwards comment, I would have to say if you're not very patient, you would probably get upset waiting to do things, or perhaps start reading a book, or doing something else ( cook dinner ? Yes, exaggeration ). I myself got very frustrated just navigating around in XP home on these two Dell mini's, but I am not exactly patient. For someone else who has little experience with reasonably updated Windows system, they would probably be happy. *Until* they try and do something like play a game other than minesweeper, or tried using Photoshop, etc.
On the flip side of things, the atom classed CPU's would make for a fairly decent embedded system CPU. But only for certain applications, and definitely not in netbook form. unless perhaps a developer was using one for the development stages for some reason.
In your scenario where you may have a CEO who wants to "go green", there are better options. One could consider buying a specific motherboard with the ability to undervolt/underclock the system, and pay someone to set this up in the BIOS. George Oui ( last name correctly spelled ? ) from ZDNets tech article section ( before he left ) seemed to have done some very intensive/hands on testing of some of the lower power rated Core 2 Duo CPU's, and was able to to achieve ~50W for a single system including a LCD monitor ( full load ). That is definitely not bad for a desktop classed system, but you could do better with laptop classed parts in a mini ITX system ( which are available ), but at a comparitively higher price. All in all however, it would probably be better to contact an OEM vendor such as Dell, tell them what you need, and see if they can build something to meet your needs.
As for the testing . . . I do not see what they could do really. Well, other than what they have done except perhaps include system boot times. Only the odd "current" titled games such as WoW will play on these, and even on the ION platform, are terrible compared to any desktop system made within the last 5-6 years ( assuming said parts were current at the time ).