Asus Eee PC 1005HA surprisingly a lot of computer for a small price

Asus Netbook $269

In the $300 price range you get a surprising amount of computer in a netbook running Windows 7.  You don’t get the large hard drives, DVD player or fast video processing of a notebook. You don’t get a touch screen like the Apple iPad.  We asked a student just entering high school to put the Asus Eee PC through its paces and give us her opinion.

The ASUS Eee PC 1005 HA has a 10.1″ screen, 1.6 GHz Atom processor, 10.5 hour battery, 320 GB hard drive, WiFi 802.11n and 1 GB of RAM for $269 at Tiger Direct. We picked this one because it was popular and cost less than $300.

The Eee PC netbook is very compact and easy to carry, roughly the size of an iPad. It doesn’t have touchscreen but does have a decent keyboard and built in video cam. The screen is easy to read.

Asus gives you another 500 GB of storage in the cloud which is handy when the hard drive gets full. The Atom processor seems fast enough for word processing, downloading pictures from a digital camera, watching movies or TV and browsing the internet. 

Hands-on review

By Hannah MacDonald – A couple of points I love about this computer are that it is small and light. It’s very easy to move from place to place.

The battery lasts for at least 6 hours at a time, that’s as long as I had patience to see if it would die on me.

Also as someone who always uses the Caps Lock key to make uppercase letters instead of the shift key, I love this one! When you click Caps Lock a little box will pop up on the right hand side saying “CAPS LOCK: ON” or “CAPS LOCK: OFF” with is really helpful.

This computer is great for writing, well once you get use to the small keyboard. It is awesome for surfing the web, whether you’re reading articles or stories, or watching shows you missed a night or two ago.

It is usually fast after you let her start up the way she wants!  The screen size can be good because it is small. You can see over it to check on the kids (babysitting), the time, or supper – tons of stuff.

But sometimes the small screen is a downfall, because if you decide “hey I want to play a game online.” Once you click the game you have to scroll up or down to get the full game screen. You can make the zoom different so now you don’t have to scroll but now parts of the game are cut off.  In all actuality it didn’t work, you just wasted some of your time trying to figure it out when it wasn’t really going to help!

Of course there are also a couple of things that I don’t like about this computer. There is no CD ROM, so you can’t watch DVD’s or listen to CD’s on this computer so that sucks! And the last thing that I don’t like about it is that the touch pad is WAY too sensitive for my liking.

Thank you Hannah for your review.

Netbooks, notebooks and tablets

Netbooks were extremely popular last year with over 30 million sold and another 20 million this year. Asus is the prime supplier of netbooks. Asus predict that by 2012, tablets, of which they plan to introduce several this fall, will begin to replace netbooks. For now, netbooks are the least expensive, ultra portable computers available to consumers.