Customer Reviews

ASUS Eee PC 900HA 8.9-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel ATOM N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 10 GB Eee Storage, XP Home) Black

5 star:		(167)
4 star:		(64)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I have the Acer Aspire One and the Asus 900HA and have installed memory upgrades on both. Although they are very similar (Atom processor, 160GB HD, 8.9" screen, 1GB RAM installed, Windows XP Home, etc) there are important differences worth mentioning.

(1) Size and weight: Asus wins here. 4-cell Asus is about 1" narrower in both width and height and a little lighter than the 6-cell Acer (the 1" height difference is due to the protruding battery from the back of the Acer). Thickness is about the same.

(2) Screen brightness: Acer wins here. Although the LCD panels are the same size and have the same native resolution the Acer screen is much brighter at max and appears crisper. Also the default Windows icons are much larger on the Asus (icon size can be adjusted using Windows).

(3) Upgrading: Asus wins big here. Remove a bottom panel with two screws from the Asus and you can easily swap out the single 1GB memory module for a 2GB module that costs about $30. You can even swap out the 160GB hard drive for a still larger one. The Acer is another story. It requires total disassembly and careful reassembly (numerous videos and pictorial instructions available on the web) to replace the socketed 512MB module with a 1GB max module. This procedure also negates the warranty - how clever! Some genius at Acer decided to solder 512MB onto the motherboard, thus limiting the max memory to 1.5GB. To add insult to injury, the Acer design team also placed a removable panel on the bottom which opens into an unused cavity. That panel could have been moved or expanded in size to allow easy memory and hard drive access.

(4) Keyboard and touch pad: Acer wins big here. The reason the Acer is about 1" wider is due to a wider keyboard. The keys are not only larger on the Acer but they seem to have more tactile feedback. The Asus keyboard also has a tiny shift key which often fails to register unless tapped near the center. Asus has just introduced the 904HA which provides a wider keyboard (and wider computer) but uses the same 8.9" screen. The Acer touchpad is unbelievably smooth to the touch although the buttons are located to the sides (allowing larger keyboard). The Asus touchpad is a little larger but rougher finish with conventional button locations below the pad.

(5) Battery life: Acer big 6 cell, Asus smaller 4 cell but the brighter screen on the Acer may negate some of that advantage. I have not run them down on the battery to compare this.

(6) Fit and Finish: The Acer appears slightly better to me with stunning quality external fit and finish (every bit as good as my $2000 Sony Viao). The Asus has cheaper looking power and mouse buttons but a nice glossy black external finish.

Summary: Acer wins in quality of screen, keyboard, touch pad and fit and finish. Asus wins in smaller size and lighter weight and wins big in ease to upgrade memory or hard drive. One more thing: Asus provides a nice custom fit carrying pouch while Acer lets you buy your own from a third party (they only make a large size case).

Pros: Low Price, Ultra portability, excellent screen resolution and contrast, great performance

Cons: non-full-size keyboard, super-short space bar. (believe it or not, that's all you can be picky about this great product)

Prposed solution for the "cons": external keyboard, mouse, and screen.

Review:
This is my third laptop by ASUS. and i have to say, this is the best ASUS yet! It has a 1.6GHz CPU with 1GB of memory. more than enough to run Windows XP and daily applications. for those who are worried if the screen is too smaall, dont worry! it has the same pixel-per-square-inch as a normal 12 inch laptop. normally 12-inch laptops have 1280x800 resolution, while the Eee 900HA has 1024x600. as you can calculate, the ratio of the screen sizes is 4:3, and the ratio in number of pixels is also 4:3. as a result, you get smaller viewing area but the same icon and text size.

as for the keyboard, from typing this review entirely on my Eee 900HA, i have to say the short space bar is really to miss. but i will hook it up to n external monitor, keyboard, and mouse normally. it supports up to 1920x1080 for external monitors via a standard D-SUB connection. so that will be the perfect solution.

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the following is my own opinion on why i picked the Eee 900HA over these other commonly compared products:

ASUS Eee 900HA vs. Eee900A vs. Eee904HA vs. Acer Aspire One

Same across all 4 products:
Screen: 8.9" 1024x600'
CPu: Intel Atom 1.6GHz
RAM: 1GB
OS: Windows XP Home (I got SP3 with it)
Connectors: VGA (D-SUB)x1, USB2.0 x3, Ethernet x1, SD Card Reader, headphone and mic.

Hard Drive:
Eee900HA: 160GB HDD
Eee900A: 20GB SSD
Eee904HA: 160GB HDD
Acer A1: 120GB HDD
Analysis: the Eee900HA and 904HA wins by having bigger hard drives. while Eee900A wins by having solid state drive which is more shock resistant and provides a longer battery life. and the Acer Aspire One is the least appealing in this category

Battery Life:
Eee900HA: 4 cell, 5-hour officially rated
Eee900A: 4 cell, 7 to 8 hours (from a friend)
Eee904HA: 6 cell, 7-8 hours (approx)
Aspire One: 4 cell, 3-4 hours (from salesperson at a local electronic store)
Analysis: The Eee 900A and the 904HA wins with longest battery life, but they both suffer from a side effect. the Eee900A has a really small hard drive, which makes it hard to act as a real laptop. the Eee904HA results bigger in size to fit the bigger battery. in fact, the size of the 904HA is the same as the size of the Eee1000HA, which has the same spec except a 10" screen (clearly more expensive). The Eee900HA and the Acer Aspire One should have approximately the same battery life since the official rating is with everything turned off.

the ultimate deecision:
If you just want a portable internet/working device and not an actual laptop, go for the Eee900A
if you really need a long battery life, skip 904HA and get the Eee1000HA.
if you need a laptop and the ultra portability but can find a plug at most places you go (like me), go for the Eee900HA(like me)

This is the product that has the best bang for the buck if you are looking for a budget "netbook" with all the latest features: An Atom CPU, large 160GB hard drive, decent battry life (up to 5 hours), webcam, wireless b/g, plus ASUS back up a 30days zero bright dot LCD (which means you can get your LCD panel replaced if you find any birght dot - mine does not have any. I think ASUS is very confident on this or they might have a lot of returns). The extra 10GB internet storage is not gigantic but is useful for me since it allows multiple users to access it - I use it as a share drive with my friends and it's very useful when you need to share pictures & video with your friends. The screen is plenty bright for me and its 1024x600 screen is great for its size. It works well for watching internet streaming video and surfing the web/ checking emails.

It come with not just a recovery disk, but also a hidden partition for the OS - which means you can reset to factory setting with simply a click away. This is very convenient especially all the netbooks does not come with an optical drive to read the recovery CD.

I loaded Adobe Photo Shop 6.0 and MS Office 2007 and both of them run great not a problem at all. In fact it runs photo shop 6 better than the full size PC I had when I first purchased it several years ago.

At $349 this thing is a steal. I would recommend it to everyone.

I purchased this netbook due to the good reviews at amazon. It is a neat little machine that is very portable as indicated by other reviewers. I've had mine for about one week, and have a constant problem with the screen going blank for no reason at all. I have to perform a hard shutdown (holding down the power key). It will reboot fine, but will periodically go blank again, even when it is just sitting still.

There is an eee pc users forum -- apparently many people have this same experience. Many fixes are suggested, but nothing seems to work for most people. I will call asus, but I am not hopeful. Most likely, I will return the unit this week.

I'm not new to netbooks. I started with the Asus 701 just before Thanksgiving 2007. I liked that machine a lot except for two things: the screen, not because of its size but because of its 800x480 resolution, and measley 4GB solid state drive. Asus has the habit of releasing a new model every other week (literally!), but I knew what I wanted, and so I waited. The 900 30G with its 9" screen (8.9" really, as are all 9" netbooks; it's easier to call them 9" than 8.9") and 30 GB hard drive was released early this summer but never reached the U.S. Instead, a few months later, we have the 900HA with its 160 GB hard drive and faster processor. It was worth the wait.

Do you want a 900HA? Maybe, maybe not. There are basically three things to consider: weight, the size of the keyboard, and the configuration of the keyboard.

(1) weight: The 701 weighed about 2lbs. The 900HA weighs about 2lbs 7oz. The 1000H, the next step up, weighs about 3lbs 2oz. I find 2 lbs to be the limit where I don't care if I'm carrying it. Above 2lbs I start to notice it. By 3lbs, it's just a small laptop. If weight is not a major consideration, don't get a 9" netbook. Get a 10", not because of the screen size, but because of...

(2) size of the keyboard: the 900HA's keyboard is tiny! You can find the actual specs on the web. Many people take an instant dislike to it. Many have trouble typing on it. The keyboards on the 10" netbooks are slightly smaller than standard, but not noticeably so. If weight weren't a major consideration, I'd have opted for a 10" machine. To be honest, if I don't adjust within the next week, I may abandon the 900HA for a 1000H.

(3) the configuration of the keyboard: This is subtle but can drive you crazy if you use more than one notebook. In part because they have no dedicated keypad, notebooks have a Function (Fn) key which works as a second shift key to allow keypad functions to be assigned to other keys and some control functions (brighten screen, mute, toggle wireless,...) to be assigned to the function (F1-F12) keys. Some companies (Asus and Dell) order the bottom row of keys from the left as Ctrl, Fn, Windows, Alt,... Other companies (MSI, Lenovo) swap the Ctrl and Fn keys so that the order is Fn, Ctrl, Windows, Alt,... The Fn key is configured in the BIOS, so key swapping utilities are no use here. If you are used to one type of keyboard (in my case, I've been using Dells ever since there were laptops), using the other type occasionally can be maddening. When I'm asked for a netbook recommendation, the first thing I ask is what kind of keyboard the person might be accustomed to. (Forget the Dell Mini Inspiron! Even F1-F10 do not have dedicated keys! They've been mapped to other keys through the Fn key. F11 [toggle to maximize your Firefox panel by eliminating menu bars] and F12 are missing completely!)

So, there you have it. Choose a 10" netbook unless weight is an issue and pick the manufacturer and model depending on how you might want your keyboard configured.

Other 900HA fun facts!

(1) There have been a lot of complaints about the space bar failing to record keystrokes. For that reason, this is my second 900HA. The first one missed spaces. This one seems better, but not perfect. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to it as both of my 900HAs came from the same dealer within 2 days of each other so, presumably, were from the same lot. If your space bar seems flaky, it's probably not you.

(2) There are no lights to indicate the status of CapsLock, NumLock, and ScrLock. Many (including me) have downloaded and installed the Microsoft keyboard driver. The Wireless 2000 configuration seems to be the model of choice. It causes a status balloon to appear for a few seconds when one of the keys is pressed.

(3) The 900HA is shipped with its 160 GB drive partitioned into two 80GB drivess (C: and D:). This is easily remedied with the free partition manager from Easus (no relation to Asus from what I can tell). Simply delete the D partition and drag the graphic representing the C partition to take up the freed up space. DO NOT DELETE any partition other than D as the others contain the system restore software! When I had to return my first 900HA, system restore reformatted everything, which was comforting because I had entered a bit of personal information into some applications before realizing the problem was with the computer and not my typing!

(4) The Elantech touchpad uses multifinger control. Scrolling, for example, is accomplished not by dragging a single finger on the edge of the trackpad but by dragging two fingers vertically anywhere on the trackpad. It doesn't scroll well in Firefox. The trick is to go into Elantech/Options/Tapping and uncheck the "Disable while typing" box. Then, it will work fine. You may even want to slow the speed! I find that I have a hard time stopping if I drag, but everything works the way it should if I rock my fingers vertically instead.

I'm giving the 900HA 5 stars because its problems appear to be inherent in a small keyboard. However, if a small keyboard is not for you, you will give the 900HA ZERO stars and be miserable. If time is not an issue, the ideal solution may be to wait for the next wave of netbooks that promise to get 10" machines down to the weight of the current 9"ers.

Added in edit 12/5/'08: If the netbook market is doing one thing, it is evolving at an incredibly rapid pace. If weight is an issue, but you'd sacririce a bit on size to get a larger keyboard, consider the newly released ASUS Eee PC 1002HA 10-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 10 GB Internet Storage, XP Home) Brushed Aluminized. 10" screen, larger keybeard, SAME WEIGHT as 900HA!

This is my second Asus Eee PC and I love these little powerhouses. They do exactly what I need for them to do and even more--I'm a writer and editor--and take up very little space. I did my research before I bought one (the significant other is a tech geek and I trust his knowledge) and I liked what I discovered.

The Asus EecPC weighs nearly next-to-nothing and is super-portable, with many of the features of the larger and more high-end laptops. This is a great netbook for students (I bought one for my niece in high school). It came ready-to-run right out of the box. It's also great for those people who want to get their feet wet but aren't ready to spend a bundle for a system that's more than they really need.

The first one I purchased was the 700 Series 4GB (gigabyte) model and though it ran Linux, that wasn't a problem because it's compatible with MS Office. I added an extra 4GB SDHC card and still have plenty of room left. I liked that these were solid-state machines--meaning no moving parts--because I tend to be hard on electronics being always on the move. The down side of the 700 Series was the tendancy to run a little warm and the relatively short battery life--about three hours.

Now I own this version and am in LOVE! Having the XP version has made my writing and editing tasks a pleasure and the larger screen--YAY!!! It boots up very fast. This one weighs a little more because of the 160GB hard drive, but compared to my HP Pavilion, it's like comparing a plastic dinosaur to Godzilla. I'm still playing around with the various features and configuring it to my liking.

I don't quite get the complaints about the size of the keyboard--have people looked at their cell phones and Blackberrys lately? I think I'm getting carpal tunnel in my thumbs from texting so much! I'm perfectly fine with the Asus' keyboard size and find that I actually type faster on it.

My only complaint is a minor cosmetic one--I bought the shiny black and it's a magnet for fingerprints--which is why I purchased the silicone sleeve a day or so later. I'm happy now.

Asus should be paying me because I've sold at least TEN of these to people while doing work on my commute. If anything, these computers are a real attention-getter and sometimes I find it hard to actually do any writing because people are always asking me about it.

After some online research, I got hooked and bought the Asus. It arrived in 4 days. It's the same price as the Acer but is slightly smaller, has a 160G hard drive instead of 120G and has a 4 cell battery instead of 3 cell, giving 5 hours instead of 3 hours of battery life (tested). Other features over the other brands are a matte, not glossy, display, system recovery tools, and a slipcase. Wireless connectivity is transparent and solid. I updated to IE 7 and found that tab browsing is particularly useful on this platform. I have 7 home tabs that open on startup and they load practically immediately. One downside from the Acer is that the webcam is 0.3Mpixels instead of 1.3Mpixels but live video with this is adequate. Should be no problem making a YouTube video with this.

This comes with Windows XP Home which runs about as good as my HP full size laptop. The one noticable performance thing is a slight delay in screen update when quickly scrolling a long, busy web page, due to non-dedicated graphics memory.

I installed some developer tools (not VS yet) and a virtual machine (VirtualBox) with Linux installed as a guest OS. Concurrently running a few of these things has so far not shown any issues. Launching programs is as fast as any other system I use. I've never been a touchpad fan but on this small platform I found that it works pretty well, moving around the smaller screen faster than other platforms.

Overall, I find this thing to be great fun, especially for the price!

I've been a heavy computer user for most of my life, but I have never owned a laptop. Recently however, I realized a laptop would be very useful for me, and the small size and light weight of the eeepcs really appealed to me. I spent about a month looking at the various models and trying to decide what I wanted. I was really wanting one with a solid-state drive in it, because I had been led to believe that solid state drives were very fast. However, someone told me that the SSDs in most of the eeepcs were actually very, very slow, and he recommended I purchase this model instead, which not only has a much faster hard drive, but WAY more storage as well.

I couldn't be happier with my purchase. I have given this device a rating of 5 stars, but I don't mean to imply that this machine is perfect or does not have any faults. My rating simply means that for the price, I found this to be an incredible value, and it does everything and more that I would expect from something at this price level.

Under my typical usage, I find that the battery lasts about 3-4 hours. If you disable wifi and set the screen brightness to about 50 or 60%, and don't do any processing-intensive tasks, then you can get about 5 hours out of it. The screen is very bright, and I find that I don't want it set any higher than 60% anyways.

I'm constantly surprised by the power of this little thing. It can play back most of my high definition video files flawlessly. I can even run photoshop and do some basic video editing tasks on it. Don't expect it to run any recent 3d games though.

I find the build quality to be very nice. The outer casing is glossy and shiny, and as others have probably mentioned it is easily covered in fingerprints. A small cloth is included which is perfect for cleaning your screen or the outside casing. A small carrying pouch is also included, but I don't really see the purpose of it. It doesn't have any sort of handle or strap on it, and there is nowhere to put the power cables, so I don't really see the point unless you are really scared about getting it scratched up or something. The power cables have velcro loops attached, so you can easily wrap up the cables for storage.

The only complaints that I have about this device are intrinsic to the design, and I understood them when I made my purchase. This is a small device. This means the screen and the keyboard are small. I find that the screen is large enough to satisfy me, but things can get cluttered if you want to have multiple windows up at once. If you tend to work with one window maximized, then you probably wont run into any issues with most applications. As for the keyboard, it's alright, I suppose. To get an idea of the size of the keys, about 4 keys on the eeepc would fit into the space of 3 keys on a desktop keyboard. It's a bit cramped, but for typing in web addresses, or chatting, or other basic things, its not terribly annoying. I wouldn't really want to write a 10 page report on this thing, though. The 1000 series models have slightly larger keyboards, I believe.

After searching for a long time, I have decided to go for the new EEEPC 900HA from ASUS (actually it's my husband's decision...he is an engineer so I listen to him for all the computer purchase)

Frankly speaking, I have never heard of the brand so I was a little hesitate, especially this model is much cheaper than other brands with the same spec. But my husband told me there is no need to worry since all major computers are made by ASUS, including Dell and HP. So I think it should be OK. And he is right. The product quality is very good --- even better than my "old" laptop (which I purchased only for two years) --- lighter, smaller, runs faster, and much cheaper!

I recently bought one of these for my father to use so he can escape to a coffee shop or similar haunt to grab e-mail and surf to his heart's content.

After perusing the two best known candidates, the Asus and the Acer 8.9" netbooks, the Asus won me over with it's overall build & screen quality, and features. The Acer is nice, but expanding/repairing the Asus is much, much better due to the easy access bottom panel. The Acer lacks that feature. Additionally, the Acer LCD panel just did not compare quality wise and the unconventional mouse button placement was more awkward than the slightly revised keyboard of the Asus.

Loaded Open Office 3, Acrobat, and all of the usual suspects for free but usable software to find the Asus runs everything with ease. If you opt to upgrade to 2 gigs of memory the thing is unbelievably quick (given the form factor).

Pros - price, excellent construction, performance, good wi-fi performance, easy expansion access, and easily 4+ hours of use from the battery.

Cons - keyboard is obviously small and abnormally laid out.

Think I will buy one for work to reformat with Windows XP Pro and "dock" it to my USB hub (with external drives, kyb, & mouse) to ultimately replace my desktop.

Very powerful, very portable, and a great unit for the price.