Customer Reviews

ASUS Eee PC 1101HA-MU1X-BK 11.6-Inch Black Netbook - 11 Hour Battery Life

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Asus eee 1101 is Asus's first foray into the "bridge" gap between 10" netbooks and 12" laptops, and has a fair number of strengths and a few weaknesses.

A few differences between this and the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-PU1X-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - 10.5 Hour Battery Life:

* The 1101HA has a slightly slower processor (1.33 Ghz) versus 1.66 Ghz. You're able to overclock it to make up for that performance loss, however.
* The LCD on the 1101HA is is 720p (1366x768), but anything running at 720p will most likely overtax the CPU and make it a poor viewing experience. Even playing Quicktime mp4 (720p) with a 5mbps bit rate had frame dropping.
* Awesome battery life. Laptop Magazine reported nearly 9 hours of battery life on their torture test but it hit 7.5 hours in my test of WiFi + movie playing.

The main competition is the Acer Aspire One AO751h-1893 11.6-Inch Black Netbook - 8 Hour Battery Life, which has a slightly smaller pricetag to match the slightly less battery runtime. But it also includes Vista, a bigger hard drive and more memory. So, on the dawn of Windows 7's release date, having Vista would make the upgrade process to Windows 7 slightly easier. Even though I've had mixed experience with the Acer brand, it represents a better value than the 1101HA.

The problem that if you were to shop for a netbook today, you're almost innundated with choices. There are too many to choose from, and there's not one that stands out from the rest. The Asus 1101HA is an great netbook, but it doesn't make the decision easier to choose between this and the Acer A0751h.

When my wife wanted suggestions about what new laptop to purchase, I suggested this netbook. I recommended it because it had an SVGA+ display (1366 x 768 pixels) and amazingly long battery life. The screen and battery have not disappointed us.

However, we have noticed three major difficiencies in this netbook.

First, the speakers are just terrible. There is no bass whatsoever, and the midrange is pretty nonexistent as well. Frankly, I cannot bear to listen to music played on this netbook. I have gone into the Realtek equalizer and cranked the bass and dropped the high-end frequencies. It still sounds awful.

Second, the touchpad buttons are a rocker, not separate buttons. This means that you must press on the outside edges of the rocker in order to click. Which means your thumb has to travel a long way to switch between right and left clicks. I find this a real hassle. I have to move my whole hand to switch between buttons. This is lousy from an ergonomic standpoint.

Third, I did not know when I recommended this netbook to my wife that the CPU is designed to only recognize up to 1GB of RAM! I had planned to add another 1GB in order to improve performance and multitasking ability.

I currently own a different ASUS netbook myself -- a 1000HE ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - 9.5 Hour Battery Life. I love it, except for its limited screen resolution (1024x600). Its speakers are vastly superior to those in the 1101HA. Music sounds great on the 1000HE. Also, the Atom N280 CPU in the 1000HE sees the 2GB of RAM I put in the machine.

I have one last complaint that applies to both the 1000HE and the 1101HA. It is that both these netbooks have wireless cards built in that only support the 2.4 GHz ISM band. This band is also used by microwave ovens, cordless phones and bluetooth. This means that the range and speed of the wireless connection is often degraded by interference. Newer 802.11n cards support the 5 GHz ISM band. Some cards even support combining the bandwidth in both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. I am planning to have my next laptop/netbook support the 5 GHz band.

Aside from these complaints, both the ASUS 1000HE and 1101HA are great netbooks!

I hope this helps you select the best purchase for you.

If you are looking for a Netbook with a great screen, unbelievable battery life, solid build quality, I highly recommend the 1101HA from ASUS. I have been using mine for a little over a month, and am so far very satisfied. I use this both to just surf the web when I am kicked back on the coach, and when I travel as my primary system. I travel very frequently, gone are the days when I have to run around the airport trying to find an outlet. I can put in a solid 8 hour day and just 'forget' to plug the system in for power. It doesn't compare to my x301 thinkpad, but that is a $2K different class of system (this is a netbook, not a notebook). The 1101HA has an overdrive feature, that coupled with the built in Atom extensions for HD really boost performance when you want to watch movies, or have an intensive application (editing a large presentation).

If you are deployed this is a great choice, I would have been really happy to have had this the last time I was in the desert. It comes with a padded pouch, just throw it in your ruck and forget about it. Small enough to carry around, big enough to use.

Pros:
1. The screen is 11.6", not the standard run of the mill 10". More importantly it has a higher resolution than most netbooks out there at 1366 x 768.
2. Nice keyboard size for a netbook, feels well made, and allows me to type at speed.
3. Button to turn off the build in mouse-pad if your using a bluetooth (or any) mouse.
4. Bluetooth, definitely a positive, I have paired this to my earpiece to use with my softphone (or skype etc).
5. Great battery life.
6. Really nice build quality, looks great.

Cons:
Not much really, I never write reviews, it has to really be just that good to motivate me. The fingerprints left on the gloss finish don't bother me, especially since ASUS provided a special cloth designed for that. The only real grip I have is that there is not external access to the hard drive, if you want to put an SSD in this system, you have to crack this sucker open (not for the faint of heart).
If you are going to upgrade the memory to 2GB, you need to purchase specific versions or it will disable the over-clocking feature. The ASUS support sit lists the memory modules that are know to work.

Linux: If you don't use Linux, that's it, if you do read on..

I use Fedora, assuming that other distros will have similar results. Installed Fedora 11, you will need to add the plousbo yum repo for the GMA500 that Will Adam from Red Hat is driving. I bought the Fluendo codecs, they have a specific version to support the Atom that takes advantage of the hardware decoders. To manipulate the over-clocking feature you simply echo values to /proc, google it ;-). Outside of that, it just worked, webcam, bluetooth, etc.

I've been using this netbook for just over 3 months now. My last laptop lasted for about 2 hours max and was probably about 3x as heavy and a bit larger screen, so naturally I love this thing already. I'll throw in the pros and cons first for you.

PROS:
* I get about 8 hours battery life normally with wifi on. If I were to dim the screen a bit, I could potentially get around 9.5. Without wifi, I could realistically see how someone could get the advertised time out of the battery. Remember they advertise max, which is pretty misleading. If you've never had a laptop/netbook with such a long battery life, I can tell you that it's just liberating.
* The LED backlit screen is nice, as it does actually get bright enough for use (I've seen brighter, but I've seen darker too). I don't see any sort of bright spots that I normally see with non-LED-backlit LCDs.
* POST kicks you into the bootloader almost instantly.
* The fan is usually unnoticeable and doesn't get very loud at max speed.
* The screen resolution is higher than previous Eee versions and performs quite well at it.
* There is a function button to scroll through resolutions on the fly.
* The thing is light.
* There's a slight sparkle in the shell's plastic, which is kinda cool.
* Comes with XP and not Vista.
* Integrated bluetooth is cool. It works like it should.

CONS:
* The right shift key is small, smaller than even previous Eee versions. This makes me look at the keyboard a bit and can get annoying at times.
* I didn't expect much from the speakers, but they are very much underpowered. When washing dishes while watching Hulu or Netflix, I just can't hear the thing. This may be to conserve power, but they could use a little boost. Of course, they're small "tinny" sounding speakers, which is pretty much expected in the first place, but I haven't even owned a cellphone this quiet.
* Other people have had better luck at this apparently, but I can't for the life of me get accelerated video or even networking (beside wireless USB dongle) to work in linux. This is after trying 3 different distros and trying to hunt down the right module. Currently I don't know of a distro that supports this hardware sufficiently out of the box (even Eee specific), but it'll be a pain to get stuff running correctly from my experience.
* The webcam is pretty much unusable if you want to use it for video. I was getting about 1 frame per 3 seconds or so with Skype. I'm hoping this is a configuration issue, but the driver doesn't have much for options (not even changing resolution or FPS). The person on the other end looked fine, and bumping the processor up to "Super Performance Mode" didn't help. Seriously, don't even consider this for the webcam. You might as well buy an external. I have a $10 webcam that works better. Apparently the mic is decent though.
* The netbook comes with a microfiber cleaning cloth, but I would just use it for the screen. The shell's gloss is not worth cleaning, because you'd end up cleaning off the smudges all the time. I just wish it weren't glossy.
* No DirectDraw support. :-(

Now on to what works and what doesn't.

WORKS:
* Hulu - Works well at 800x600 while watching standard definition.
* YouTube - Same as above, don't even try HD.
* Netflix Streaming full screen - Works very well actually at 800x600, but video will studder about 45 minutes in, catching up to normal after a few seconds. Maybe more RAM would fix this.
* OpenOffice
* GIMP - Slow to start, works well after.
* FCEUX
* iTunes
* TomTom Home
* Firefox
* Skype
* MagicISO - A virtual CD/DVD-ROM.
* BitPim
* Citrix clients - Work flawlessly.
* Juniper VPN
* SpyBot

DOESN'T WORK:
* Starcraft - Computer doesn't support DirectDraw.
* Dark Reign - Same issue as above.
* CamSpace - Runs, but the webcam can't keep up.

OTHER THOUGHTS:
I don't regret buying this as it's leaps and bounds over my laptop I bought the night Vista was released (a Gateway, saved about $150 on hardware alone as it was on sale). This thing has a few annoyances, but I think it's worth the price. I would however wait to see if Asus is going to release something that rivals this with a larger shift button at least (yes, it is 'that' annoying). Don't buy this laptop hoping to play old-skool computer games, unless you can find some sort of emulator that will emulate DirectDraw. I bought this excited it had XP to actually play these games, but they just won't work after many attempts. I may upgrade the RAM to 2GB (yes, you 'can' do this) and it may help out with performance a bit. I was thinking about upgrading the drive to solid state, but I just can't justify the cost, especially since the current drive works well and the battery life is already pretty darn good.

Yes, it's small, just like I wanted. I didn't want it for anything resource intensive, so the slow processor wasn't an issue. It's definitely a fingerprint magnet and, yes, the speakers are just plain bad. None of that bothered me. The deal breaker came when I noticed that the AC charger gets WAY hotter than I was comfortable with. When I first opened the box, the size of the charger surprised me. It's tiny - a lot smaller than any wall wart I've seen that puts out 2 amps @ 19Volts. I would guess this was done on purpose to enhance the "smallness" of the Netbook itself. But, after what I've seen online when I checked to see if this was a common problem, I'd call it a design flaw.

The tech forums are full of issues with the chargers dying out very quickly. On top of that are the complaints of Asus either dragging their feet in replacing them, or even ignoring requests for said replacement. It seems there's a known issue with the chargers and, again taking a guess, it probably has Asus backed up against the wall because they can't keep up with the demand for replacements. I don't know about you, but when I buy a computer, I want to use it. That's hard to do on a portable if you either don't have a charger or are waiting for weeks to get one. As much as I like the Netbook itself, I'm going to try to return it tomorrow.

*****************
Updated.
I'm stuck with it. I fought with B*** B** for over an hour and they refuse to accept it as a return. So I'm definitely "not pleased". On top of the charger issue, I've now found that it's next to impossible to upgrade the RAM in this thing without wiping out the overclocking utility in the BIOS. There are only two know brands of 2gb RAM that Asus says will work and they're both rare and virtually unheard of - Hynix and Unisofa. And not just any Hynix or Unisofa, but only specific SKU numbers. You can read one of the threads on the forum about the issue here:
[...]

This next part really has me worried about the near future with this model. I took my old laptop in to be repaired and happened to mention to the tech that I'd bought an Eee PC. The first words out of his mouth? "I hate those!" Of course, I asked why. He told me they've been getting a lot of these for repair because, about 6 months down the road, the processors get real slow. Also, the heat from the unit makes the video chip start to lift up from the motherboard causing the picture to get lines in them.

No happy thoughts about this.

My wife picked up this little ASUS last weekend when we urgently needed a small, working laptop. Given its size, low cost and what I'd read about netbooks, my expectations were very low, which made the 1101 HA a really pleasant surprise. Setup was minimal and very easy, and it feels very solid and well-built. It performs great for writing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. I reorganized a 150 MB external drive on it without a hitch, including sorting and consolidating 5000 photos. I've had good experiences with a wide range of audio and video--from Pandora and live video streams, to watching YouTube clips and full screen movie trailers. I was particularly surprised that it was able to stream a live press conference to an external monitor while I worked and did email on the LCD.

This said, there are some limitations to be aware of. While noticeably bigger than 10" netbooks, the screen still seems small and cramped when you're working on big documents or PDFs. And while the keyboard is generally comfortable, the size and positioning of the shift keys is cramped and a little awkward as well.

When it's got a strong wireless signal--which it usually does--internet performance is very good. That said, the weak signal I get in a few places in my house suggests the range on the built-in wireless card may be shorter than in larger notebooks I've used.

The built-in speakers are louder than I expected for a machine this size, but they're rather tinny. The sound through headphones or external speakers is very good.

All in all, this is a great solution for mobile computing. For me, it won't replace a larger, faster laptop, but it came pretty close at a fraction of the weight and cost.

Great computer! Bought this directly off of amazon about a month ago for 2 reasons: screen size/resolution (11.6" with a full 1024x768) and battery life ("11" hours according to description).

This is a really great size, its just smaller than the size of a piece of paper - Small enough to carry around like it's nothing, but big enough to not need a magnifying glass to see.

Battery life is great, I use a lot of programs, firefox tabs, and the screen brightness is never all the way down, and I still get 7-8 hours on a charge. Oh yeah - it takes about 2-2.5 hours to charge fully. Love it.

Love the SD card slot, it's like having a usb stick always plugged in!

I thought the audio was fine, I'm perfectly happy with it. The speaker is on the bottom which can make it sound muffled, but usually you can't even tell.

The keyboard is so-so, I'm a programmer and I can use this thing pretty well. The only thing I would want is a backlight, and maybe some small bumps around the keyboard - ie. on the arrow keys or shift keys, and some of the F keys.

As far as speed, its fine for most things. My main complaint with the entire laptop is playing video - it can't, it's tough to even run youtube video's. When actually trying to watch a flash video, the audio is fine but the video skips. I will be trying to remove some programs, but its fast enough to run almost everything, so I honestly think this thing has specifically designed hardware or software that prevents it from running video smoothly (so you still have a reason to buy that $1200 "NOTEbook").

Came with C: and D: partitions which is very convenient so you can store your files on D: and wipe out C: if need be...

Of course, for the price, I'm sure this thing won't be lasting me 3 years like my last one, but that's okay because for the price I can buy another one whenever I need to and this will become the extra coffee-table laptop!

I had a tough time figuring out if this computer was any good or not - the reviews are all over the place. Not just here but even on industry sites. A year ago I purchased the Eee PC 1000HA and still love it. So I couldn't understand how ASUS could make something so bad. So I took the plunge even with a 15% return fee.

The two things that I felt were lacking on my 1000HA were the battery life (approx 2 -3 hours depending on what I was using it for) and the screen size - 1024 is not adequate these days. The 1101HA solved both of those problems. While battery life isn't going to be 11 hours, 8 to me is fantastic. The screen is a great size at 1366 by 768. Using something like Visual Studio (I'm a developer) I don't have to hide the properties or project windows on the side. The only disappointment about the display it can have a "milky" look if you don't have the best angle.

Speed
One complaint that I saw a lot and that concerned me was the speed. The processor is actually slower than the other Asus netbooks. They chose it for the better battery life. However, I set the BIOS to maximum overclock and it works great! Running Windows XP, right now I have Visual Studio (development software), SQL Server Management Studio and Microsoft Word running. with no hesitation. I also have the stock ram of 1gb. I am not concerned about speed or ram.

Wireless Network
I also read complaints about the wireless network adapter but I have to say they must have had a problem with their router. I am a good 30 feet away, in another room and it works great - actually fast enough I have no hesitation downloading megabytes of updates, movies, etc. The files I open with Visual Studio are actually on another computer but I don't notice.

Touchpad
I haven't found any touchpad that I like but I prefer the one on the 1000HA over this one. This one is flush with the palm rests. They did make the area noticeable with a slight texture. The 1000HA has two buttons where this one has one rocker type button. I use a wireless mouse with mine if I am going to be using it for long. The one annoying thing about touchpads is accidentally touching them while you are typing. The 1101HA has a button at the top of the keyboard to turn it off - nice touch!

Design
This one not only has the same glossy shell like my 1000HA but the inside is glossy as well. I prefer the look of the 1000HA which has a nice beveled edge - a little classier looking to me. This one the edges seem a little sharp. But you don't' buy these for decorations so it's not important including the fact that the finish might get a few fingerprints.

Keyboard
The keyboard appears to be about the same size as my 1000HA. But what is different is that the keys are squared off and flat where the 1000HA are beveled. This makes the keys feel larger. The right shift key was moved to a better position (I guess they do listen to their customers) but otherwise about the same.

Watching Video
I've watched Netflix and MPGs movies and found no problem with the display other than what would be expected running video over the Internet. Far better than my 1000HA which was really choppy. You can't expect much for speakers in these little boxes but the sound was clear and not annoying by any means.

Support
Floppy and CD drives are going away. Although it comes with a CD, a nice feature built into the 1101 is the system restore is right on the hard drive. Just press F9 during boot up and you can restore the operating system But only do it in an emergency! They also have 24/7 telephone support but you may not get a knowledgeable person every time - just keep trying.

I have a desktop system but you can hook this up with an external keyboard, mouse, wired network and display and it works just like a desktop.

I was really hesitant to buy this with the 15% restocking fee but I couldn't be happier. It is not the ultimate powerhouse but what netbook is? The Asus 1101HA has great speed, great display, the best battery life, great wireless - a great netbook!

I have never had a notebook or net book that lasted over two years. I am not that heavy a user. This is just another example of planned obsolesce. Warranty ends, computer ends.

I have an 1101HAB-RBLK001X purchased from Best Buy (ya, those clowns had the cheapest one!!). Like the title says, 5 stars NO ISSUES for over 1.5 years of ownership and using it as a FULL-TIME student multiple times per week. Super compact laptop / netbook hybrid because you get blessed with a bigger keyboard and display. Excellent battery life...it started off at 8 hours (advertised) and right now its still good for 5-6 hours!!! I have 1 gig ram; because if you change it you lose that kick-ass overclock. Running XP OS... Speakers quality is decent, but are weak (what a surprise).

What it is: A lightweight, long-batt-life, portable computer <<< it does an Excellent job.

What its not: A graphics engine (no FULL screen movies / youtube) <<< It CAN run youtube videos, just not full screen. It runs MS office very well...I've built many ppt's with it...