Two months later: Asus Eee PC 1000HA netbook

This quick post is a follow up to my earlier First Take:  Asus Eee PC 1000HA review published on January 21st of this year; if you’re not familiar with that earlier post and are in the netbook market, you might want to refer to my initial thoughts on this product.

A brief bit of background: when our DELL Inspiron 5100 laptop began to show its age and started acting about as cooperative as an AIG executive appearing before a Senate sub-committee, I began thinking about potential replacements.  I’ve mentioned before on these pages how much I hate traveling with my company-issue ThinkPad and its relatively heavy power brick and so, unable to con and coerce my company into buying a netbook, I naturally started looking for one myself.

I didn’t spend months agonizing over this decision.  I may have a touch of OCD, but I’m not completely crazy.  I read a bunch of reviews, looked at a couple of units in electronic stores, and settled on the Asus by virtue of its 10″ display, reasonably large hard drive (160GB) AND the fact that it came with XP.  I resisted my strong and quintessentially idiotic urge to upgrade the RAM right off the bat (in a lucid moment I realized the Asus would be used for web surfing 95% of the time) and ordered it from Amazon.  My landed cost was $341 by virtue of a couple of award certificates; thanks to my Amazon Prime membership, I ordered it Friday morning and it showed up at 9:15AM on Saturday.

In any event:  we’ve owned it for two months.  It’s used every day.  I’ve traveled with it twice.  It rocks…

60 days later:

• It boots up and shuts down very quickly
• Programs launch in a matter of seconds
• The display is bright and luminous and there are absolutely no bad pixels
• I installed Word, Excel and PowerPoint and they work flawlessly
• We installed Firefox and my wife has actually converted to using it vs. Internet Exploder
• The wireless – a VERY weak point with our Inspiron – works great.  It connects with our router quickly, never drops the signal, and you can watch movies on Hulu anywhere in the house.  That old POS DELL struggled 30 feet from the router; of course it was about 6 years old
• The keyboard – often a drawback on these smaller units – is easy to use and typing errors are hardly any more frequent than with a full sized keyboard (this keyboard is 95% the size of a full sized keyboard).  She Who Must Be Obeyed mentioned that she occasionally has to hit the space bar twice; I’ve not had that happen.  The only genuine issue I’ve had with it was the location of the right shift key – as mentioned in my earlier piece – but I’ve fixed that (see below)
• The display DOES measure a mere 10″ diagonally; you won’t mistake it for sitting in a movie theatre.  We usually prop it on our laps or the arm of the sofa, with the screen about 14-16″ from our eyes when in use.  Some larger sites and larger photos require a bit of scrolling in order to view everything.  Pat frequents real estate sites (she is NOT looking at nearby locations) and finds that images are sometimes cut off and she has to scroll down a bit to see everything.  Life is tough (all seriousness aside, this is not a big deal)
• The touchpad is great – see the earlier post for a full description – but NOTE that it doesn’t work as well when scrolling (two fingers) with Firefox as is the case with IE
• The finish is a glossy black that attracts fingerprints like, well, insert your own joke here. The Asus comes with a small microfiber cloth and we use it to remove the fingerprints
• The battery is worth about 5 hours while surfing the net with the brightness all the way up and power management set to maximum performance
• It weighs about 3 pounds.  The power brick is small.  Traveling with it is a joy!

The right shift key

Many reviewers have commented on the size and location of the right Shift Key on the Asus Eee keyboard.  In order to have a full sized Page Up key, the right Shift Key is located a bit further away than you’re accustomed to.  In my first look at the Asus I characterized this as requiring “user re-training.”  That’s amusing and all, but I was overlooking one important fact:  I’m an old fart and am completely ill suited for any sort of re-training.  Ask my wife.

So…  I did what any sane person would do.  I poured myself an extremely large glass of red wine and got together with my close personal buddy Google. I typed in “keyboard remap” and lo and behold, the very first result lead me to a simple, FREE program that enabled me to remap (swap) the Page Up and Right Shift keys’ functions.  The process took all of 5 minutes (well, and I am somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but I actually read some of the instructions) and worked perfectly. I drank the wine anyway.

This program is called Key Tweak and is located at:  http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/

It is very simple and straightforward and I’d recommend it to anyone, regardless of your degree of geekiness. Use the “Half Teach” feature.  If you somehow screw things up, there’s an easy way to return everything to the default settings.

Update on pricing

The good news:  the price on the Asus 1000HA has dropped to $341.67 (pictured on the left below); since I purchased my unit Asus introduced the 1000HE, which boasts Bluetooth and a battery with a claimed 9½ hour life.  It sells for $389 at Amazon:

Bottom Line

I’d recommend the Asus to anyone who’s seeking a quality netbook.  It’s been a complete pleasure and my non-technical wife took to it VERY quickly.  In fact, both QVC and HSN have sent me letters thanking me for this purchase….

The Fine Print:  this post contains Amazon affiliate links