ASUS Eee PC 1000H (884840272526) PC Notebook

I recently purchased this for $549USD on Costco.com after some careful research. I wanted two things out of this computer, which I've gotten (and then some).

COMPACT/LIGHT
Weighing in just around 3 pounds is simply amazing. Yes, you give up an optical drive (looks like these may be going away on a lot of newer notebooks--see Airbook), but you sacrifice nothing on battery. Mine gets up to 7 hours with the screen on second from lowest brightness setting.

NO VISTA!
Preinstalled Windows XP Home on the 80gb hard drive (this model doesn't have the solid-state flash drive--more on this later...) means you don't have the RAM sucking and inevitable bugginess of Windows Vista. One GB of ram carries this machine well through its daily paces of Photoshop, Word, Microtorrent and Firefox (all running at once). I see ram upgrades are available, but I'm not sure I need one.

EVERYTHING ELSE:
Delivery...
Moving onward, this is simply a slick, tidy little gadget. The packaging is straightforward: you get a manual, a very lightweight and compact AC to DC adapter, a neoprene zipper case (wow, not used to getting something for free...), and the laptop cradled safely in the middle. Trust me, you won't need to read the manual. If you've ever used a laptop before, everything will be intuitive. This might be a good first laptop for a child or a senior with little computer experience.

Feel...
This thing is small and light, without being impractical. The bottom does not get very hot, even when charging. The keyboard is 90% of fullsize. After only a few hours of typing, my fingers (and mine are FAT) found each key without fail. The trackpad has a neat scroll function when you drag two fingers across it. There are three USB 2.0 ports; one on the left and two on the right, so adding a mouse won't kill your connectivity options to other devices.

What, no CD/DVD?
...so what? I personally see the optical drive going the way of floppies as flash memory becomes cheaper and cheaper. (As an aside, I predicted 15 years ago in a media class that in 20 years all media would be distributed on chips. I will probably be proven right.) If you know what you're doing (or have a 15 year old) you can figure out how to transfer anything you need onto a flash drive, over a wifi network, or rip a DVD or CD onto the spacious 80GB hard drive. The absence of an optical drive obviously lessens the weight, as well as keeping things more robust and impervious to environmental conditions.

Specs...
The 1.6Ghz Intel Atom drive plays nicely with Windows XP and 1GB of RAM. The Atom chip is designed specifically for a mini laptop, drawing less power, and as such, it performs so much cooler (in temp) than other chips.

Battery...
The battery seems to die within 10 days of a full charge if not used. Compared to the puny life of most other laptops, this does not bother me, withstanding that I get 5-7 hours out of a single charge. I haven't even exploited all of the power saving features which would likely squeeze another hour out of it. The battery is easily removed with two slider switches, and a replacement appears to be available on Ebay for under $100.

OS Performance...
As I said before, 1 GB of ram is fine. Windows XP fully loads in less than 30 seconds from a powered down state. I've never encountered a sluggishness in performance, except running full-motion video with several other apps running in the background. Even that was tolerable.

Wireless...
Wifi and bluetooth are built in, and apparently they have nice range. I can sit at my neighbor's house 150 feet away and still pick up my wifi functionally. This may be a function of the transmitter, but it's nothing fancy. I haven't used the bluetooth, but I assume it's on par with the wifi.

Webcam...
There is a built-in 1.3MP webcam atop the screen. It is fixed, staring at you, but it would be nice if you could rotate it away...to snap shots of cute girls in Starbucks...or whatever. The included capture application is very simple, and saves stills or full motion video (with sound).

Storage...
I highly recommend the 80GB harddrive over the 16GB flash memory drive (solid state). The shock resistant advantages for me do not outweigh the storage factor. The hard drive may add a shred of weight, but I like to have a few gigs of music and a few movies on board to entertain me.

What else?
There is a VGA port for an external display. I have had it power my 32" Vizio HDTV in full resolution mode quite capably. In fact, I have used this laptop several times as a portable a/v device, running HD movies and Itunes.

There is a handy SD card slot which handles high capacity cards...and with 16GB cards as low as $50 on Ebay, one could actually keep the OS on a card for faster functionality and startup times.

Lastly, the speakers are OK for a machine this small. Dolby enhancement is loaded to optimize sound for headphones or virtual surround.

Final words:
Portability = Versatility. Cheap = Great. Less = More.

Thank you ASUS for my favorite computer, ever!