Customer Reviews

ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005PR-PU17-BK 10.1-Inch Netbook (Black)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Got it 4 days ago and I've been playing with this puppy everyday. Just make sure you update to the new flash 10.1 and also update the drivers for the Broadcom Crystal. It plays youtube HD @ 720p or 1080p without a sweat. Battery time is as advertised. I even upgraded to a Kingston V+ SSD and this thing flies. I have tried several netbooks and even the "magical" ipad, and this is a keeper. Small, light, plays HD and blu-rays, plays HD flash videos without a hiccup, long lasting battery life, 250gb hard drive @ only $399.00. Did I forget to mention 1366x768 true HD display?

PS. I was able to play my Avatar blu ray @ 1080p in my netbook. It played flawlessly. It got me teary eyed how gorgeous it looked, 10 times better than it looked in the "magical" ipad before I returned it.

Update: So far things keep going right. I read comments of people not being satisfied with their system. I had to admit that the PC right out of the box is not adequate enough to perform like you wish it would. I had to do a few updates and upgrades myself. I upgraded to a 2gb memory chip, installed a 128gb SSD, and did a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium. Got the new flash 10.1 RC 4, and the latest broadcom drivers. I understand frustration from people about the additional work that has to be invested to get this system up to your standards, but for $399 is not bad at all. The HP mini 210 HD, with a similar configuration gets close to $499, and you probably have to make the same adjustments that I mentioned before. I had the HP mini HD with a broadcom that I installed myself, and it doesn't come even close in performance to the ASUS.

For video playback, windows 7 Home Premium, supports DVD playback. Unfortunately for Blu ray files you have to upgrade to TMT platinum, and also install AnyDVD HD. But to give ASUS some credit, this system is not advertised for Blu ray playback; that would be considered an upgrade, and we have to be grateful that at least with the broadcom crystal HD card, we have the choice to upgrade if we want to.

So the bottom line, if you decide to get this system, be aware that you are going to have to get busy optimizing this netbook like any other netbook. My view is that once you trim the fat, and upgrade the memory, this system rocks.

This netbook has a great feature set and works well, despite a few niggling flaws.

PROS: Bright, full resolution screen, great battery life, HD accelerator, bluetooth, smudge-free case, kinda decent speakers, nice touchpad, very light.

CONS: Noisy keyboard, keyboard flex, takes some tweaking to get the Broadcom card to work well, bad speaker placement (under the front), stiff trackpad button.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Other users complain about bloatware and there really isn't all that much. And like any new computer, it takes awhile to configure it. I also added an SD card for a little ReadyBoost speed bump and will add another gig of RAM, but when it's in Super Performance mode, it does everything with minimal, if any, hesitation. I'm hoping the extra RAM will speed things up.

I bought this mostly as a media player and it does that well. 480 Hulu can be twitchy at times but Netflix and Youtube play very well. It's my first time using Windows 7 Starter and so far I haven't found a real need to upgrade.

The battery lasts for well over 8 hours, which is fantastic. They keyboard is noisy and flimsy but I can type fairly quickly with it. Frankly, with the video accelerator and the full screen resolution, it's the netbook I wanted at a very reasonable price. I can live with its few shortcomings.

With the latest broadcom drivers (3.3.0) and flash software:


pros:

- sleek and well built. Not the thinnest around but the battery is almost flush with the body (not promiscuously hanging in the back as most).
- bright HD screen. You can work as you are used to on a bigger laptop, plenty of room. The fonts are not too small (also can be increased).
- perfect decoding (silky smooth) of 1080p 720p 480p h264 videos files with included total media theater 3 player and MPC-HC, etc.
- Youtube (windowed) 1080p = ~22 fps, 720p=~22fps
- Youtube (fullscreen) 1080p = ~8 fps, 720p=~12fps. Amazingly, it is still watchable
- youtube (fullscreen with total media theater 3) 1080p, 720p ... silky smooth!. Works from clicking a play icon on the youtube video thumbnails in internet explorer only. 35-60% cpu max in power saving mode for 1080p
- long battery life
- noise cancelling microphones tech (with two microphones)
- great keyboard
- sdcard slot allows the card to be flush with the case

cons:

- webcam could be better in low light but ok in most conditions
- no desktop vsync due to lack of aero in win7 starter => some tearing occur on the desktop. it does not affect playing videos with total media theater 3.
- touchpad has to be tuned (disable zooming gesture)
- lack of aero on windows 7 starter makes the desktop look laggy so better optimize for performance (remove windows decorations). Tried linux 3d desktop and it is silky smooth so it is a software issue with starter.

Very happy with my purchase overall.

I got the 1005PR yesterday (10 May 1020), so it is a bit early to give a thorough review, but I felt compelled to comment on my experience so far.

At the end of the Windows installation, the Asus software says configuring system, I thought it was hanging, but after about 20 minutes it eventually completed.

I found the machine to be a bit slow, at least slower than expected.
I uninstalled the included anti virus software, and it made quite a big difference in responsiveness.

Regarding reports of missing hardware, my machine does have the "Crystal HD" hardware.

Asus has two update utilities, one called "Eee LiveUpdate" and "ASUS Update".
It seems that "Eee LiveUpdate" updates the software installed on the system, and "ASUS Update" updates the BIOS.
I don't know why they have two different applications, why not just integrate them.
"Eee LiveUpdate" updated the "ASUS Vibe" application.
When I ran "ASUS Update", it failed with an error that says "Sorry, there's no proper BIOS image file on the server!".

I wanted to double check if any updates are available, and I logged on to the Asus support site at [...].
On looking for updates, there is no product model matching 1005PR, there is 1005P, 1005PE, but no 1005PR.
I wanted to contact support about this, but you have to register to get support, yet again, there was no product matching 1005PR, so I can't register the product.
I ended up posting a question about the model number in the 1005P support forum, there is no 1005PR support forum.

As of this morning (11 May 2010) there is still no product 1005PR on the Asus registration page, the download page, or the support forum.

So 4 stars for the product, and 1 star for Asus.

This is my first netbook. Ordered and shipped on May 12, just before Amazon put a halt on selling this machine. When received, checked to have th broadcom HD card in device manager. After upgrading to 2GB ram and updating the Adobe flash to 10.1 RC4, things work fine. I just use the stock Win 7 starter. Played around for 2 days.

The good:
The hi-res screen is very nice. Screen brightness can range from very dim for use in dark to very bright.
I really like the chicklet keyboard. Very good feedback.
The "eee super-hybrid engine" is useful and fun to play around with.
On-screen-display for Wifi on/off, power mode, volume change is very responsive.

The so-so:
Viewing angle is not exceptional but usable, as mentioned in other reviews.

The bad:
The touch pad is a bit sticky. Maybe it's my oily finger. But really frustrated me a bit. Would have given it 4.5 stars. I put scotch tape over it and it is better now.

Would be nice to have:
Dedicated button for vol up/down and mute.
Separated Fn key for Wifi and Bluetooth. (Currently, Fn-F2 would cycle through all combinations of WiFi on/off and Bluetooth on/off.)

I got mine yesterday (purchased from Amazon) and after some tweaking everything works fine for me.

It came with THE CARD installed (not missing like some of the early reviewers) and it also came with the Broadcom driver installed. I didn't bother to update the driver. Only thing I had to do was to uninstall Adobe Flash player and reinstall with the Flash 10.1 beta. For some reason I had to install two separate version. "Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX and Adobe Flash Player 10 Plugin"

Youtube works great in 720p and AVCHD (.MTS) files from my digital camera plays back smoothly! (For the sound I had to install AC3 codec, googled it and found free one called AC3Filter 1.63b) Beautiful screen with high resolution. I adjusted font size to 120% from the control panel. Everything looks gorgeous. :)

I wanted a small, long-battery life netbook that can playback AVCHD files through SD card slot. I own Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 10.1 MP Digital Camera with 12x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3 inch LCD (Black), so I thought when I travel some of the aforementioned features will be handy. And now I got everything I wanted.

The build quality is on par with other affordable netbooks, but I don't care much since this will be my 2nd PC. I am not going to invest for extra RAM, since I can do what I wanted to do just fine. The trial version of office 2007 handles a 40MB powerpoint file without much trouble. And what a big difference the HD screen makes!

Thank you Asus (don't embarrass yourself), thank you Broadcom, and thank you Amazon!

I just received this 1005PR yesterday morning, and after reading these reviews here, I checked in my 'Device Manager' list of this unit and confirmed that I DO have an installed Broadcom CrystalHD Video Decoder listed under 'Sound, Video, and Game Controllers' category, and my HD plays smoothly on the included Arcsoft Media Player, but does not play sound, I assume since my sound tracks are in Dobly Digital and this trial version wont let you have all features. The Windows Media Player that is included with Windows 7 Starter doesn't seem to be playing the h.264 video, as it does try to play, but the video is all garbled up and unwatchable. HD on websites using Flash plays fine. But DO upgrade Adobe Flash Player as another reviewer here stated.

I originally had purchased a 1005HA a few months ago and wound up giving it to my wife (she doesn't care about HD) and got this 1005PR instead and I really like it so far. Except out of the box, I'm not really too happy with their entire software package / bundle. It does run really slow. You have to do all of the standard Win 7 tweaks on it to get the performance back up to par. I had put an SSD drive in the 1005HA I gave to my wife and am really happy with it, so I got another SSD drive to put in this 1005PR but just haven't put it in yet, as I want to make sure I am really happy with the entire unit before I void the warranty just yet and disassemble this thing. I put the 2GB stick of RAM in and it is performing pretty good right now, but I know with the SSD drive installed it will do a lot better. I tested several video files in full 1920 x 1080p and some video cam files in 1440 x 1080p and they play fine in that trial version of Arcsoft Media whatever-it's-called 3 thing, but the sound doesn't work (since it's the trial version doesn't play Dolby copyrighted audio), but I tried these same h.264 video clips using Windows Media Player which comes with this Win 7 starter, and like I said the video is all garbled and unwatchable. I am going to use one of my Windows Anytime Upgrade license keys and upgrade it to full Win 7 Pro which should have the fully functional Windows Media Player and I know it has a very nice h.264 Mpeg 4 decoder built-in so we'll see how that works. I am going to image this OS onto my SSD drive first and then upgrade that one to my Win 7 Pro version. For now I'm going to install my Power DVD 9 Ultra (although it's h.264 decoder is not as smooth as Windows Media Player that comes in Win 7 Pro) and I'll see how that goes.

As far as the Arcsoft Media Center solution which is included in the software bundle goes, I'm not a big fan of bundled software that is not fully-functional and didn't ship with the laptop in it's fully-functional state. This for some reason irritates me whenever I buy a new computer and none of the included software just simply works forever. I usually get mad and don't even try it too much and uninstall all the trials because I already own programs that usually work better than the trials they've packaged into the software bundle. But ever since I used the latest Windows Media Player (12 I think it is), that shipped on my Win 7 Pro for my other Lenovo Thinkpad I fell in love with their new h.264 decoder because it plays HD smooth as silk, and all my Dish Network Satellite rips are usually broadcast with h.264 compression. It is even smoother than the Power DVD 9 Ultra one by a noticable amount. So my preference as far as a media player would be to try and get Windows Media Player to work. It only ships on the new Windows 7 OSs, and I think the Win 7 Starter might not have the full featured version because like I said, it looks all garbled on this new Netbook. I will post an update when I get my upgrade key installed and I'm running the full Win 7 Pro and post back about whether the h.264 Mpeg4 works at that time.

But all in all, I am very happy with this new netbook since I don't feel like I'm working through a keyhole, because with the hi-resolution panel I have plenty of screen real estate. The other 1005HA I gave to my wife, even after adjusting the DPI and skrinking everything as small as I could in the software and registry settings, in the end it was still just a 1024x600 panel. This new hi-res panel in this 1005PR makes me feel a lot more at home since I come from a T61p Thinkpad with a 1680x1050 res panel and with all that real estate, I just couldn't get used to the limited resolution that came on netbooks, but this new netbook is the answer to the problem, the reason why I never had wanted to get a netbook before, was the pathetic resolutions they traditionally had. But with this one, I could use this all day, except the processor is still a bit slow for developers as compiling code it is way too slow with the atom processor. But if I have internet connection available, I can still connect to my server at home and do my dev work on the netbook, upload the code to the server, and then have it compile the code, so this is not a deal-breaker, just a small hassle. If they could get these compact netbooks to have real processors with Core2 Duo or Quad even, that would be the bomb. But for now, this little 1005PA is quite the little machine for what it is, and the battery life is amazing. I also bought a second battery for a spare and that's one thing the Thinkpad T61p could ever touch was it could only last maybe close to 2 hrs on battery but this 1005PR lasts more like 8-9 hours on a single battery, and I have 2 of them, so I just leave the charger at home. I do wish I could get a cradle charger though, to charge the batteries without having to put them into the netbook to charge. If somebody made a cradle charger for these and other netbook models, I think it would be a hit sale. Maybe I should send this idea to some Chinese manufacturing company, I'm sure they would jump on the chance.

But I would recommend this netbook to anyone who wants more screen real estate, and the ability to watch HD content since that is where all TV has moved and is still moving. If your netbook did not come with the Broadcom hardware or is not functioning according to the item description, then simply contact Amazon and make them send you the correct model as it was advertised, since it says right in the item description that it has this hardware. Let THEM fight with Asus since they are the big retailer with the strong arm. Amazon has been very reasonable to me as I've bought lots of stuff from them over the years, and they've never been unfair with me, and their return policies are very accomodating, almost as good as Costco's.

I'm giving it 4 stars because the current software package ought to be optimized more for performance because the bloatware makes it run slow on the Atom processor and this may deteer the average consumer who does not know how to reduce the bloatware on their own accord. Once bloatware is removed, and performance settings are optimized, and 2GB RAM is installed, then this machine performs pretty good and works decent for having an Atom processor. Developers typically tend to forget that more code is not always better. The code needs to be sized and taylored for the hardware it is running on. On, my other netbook, I still run Windows Aero Desktop theme and it works fine, but I DO turn off much of the animation in the Visual Settings, like animate menus, and fade or slide menus, etc, etc. As soon as I do the upgrade on this netbook to Win 7 Pro, I will also turn on Aero just because I like the semi transparent taskbar look and color, but I will also disable most of all the animation effects as I did on my wife's netbook. And if you go to the startup tab in msconfig what is all that junk that they think needs to run at startup? This is what I'm talking about. You can still get the pretty looks without slowing the thing down to a noticable amount. It's like they think the Atom processor is not going to go any slower, yet they run all the same stuff as the laptops they sell with the Core2 Duo processors and stuff. But other than that, so far, it looks like a decent netbook.

The Asus 1005PR is an excellent netbook with the supurb features and outstanding battery life. If, of course, you receive a unit with the Broadcom Chrystal HD card and other components installed. I purchased this netbook on pre-order and unfortunately received on of the units with out the Broadcom Chrystal HD,as well as no bluetooth. Bad Asus. Poor Quality Control. When I contacted Asus regarding the issue their front line customer service was impossible to deal with. Even though this is a heavily documented and known issue, the representative implied that they were not even aware of the problem, and after several impossibly long waits while the issue was "researched", I decided to aport that call and contact Amazom directly. Good decision. As always, the Amazom customer service prepresentative was extemely professional and eager to help. Unlike Asus, they immediately were aware of the Broadcom issue and offered to exchange or refund the product right away. Since Amazon no longer had any units in stock I opted for a refund and to wait a bit longer for Asus to address this issue before reordering. Despite the time loss in dealing with the defective model, I would still highly recommed this netbook. I had the pleasure of testing one that shipped with the Broadcom card and I was totally impressed with its performance. The monitor was crystal sharp, with excellent color. The unit I tested had a 2GB Corsair high speed gaming chip installed to bump up the RAM, and I tell you, this little netbok rocked! Was able to run multiple heafty applications simultaneously (like Dreamweaver and Photoshop), play HD videos and other media on YouTube without a hitch. The Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) allows 1005PR to really manage performace unlike any other netbook on the market, and I have tested quite a few. 11 hours of battery is indeed possible when using the netbook under low CPU demand, such as runing a single application for writing, but most users running multiple appications, bluetooth and/or using wirless Inernet will find the batery life to be more in the rage of 8 hours. Even still, this is at the very high end of what's currently available on the market. The recharge is a snap and in about 2 hours of charging you will get another 9-11 hours of battery time. The unit does ship with some bloat-ware but most computers these days do, and so I would not consider that a flaw. In addition, as with any other computer it works best when it is fully optimized-- and of course with the extra RAM-- this again would be the same for any other netbook purchase. So despite the false start with the missing Broadcom and my complete dissatifaction with ASUS costumer service, I would still highly recommend this netbook when the Broadcom issue is resolved. I also can't say enough good things about Amazon regarding their handling of the situation and I am know waiting patienly for the second release of this puppy and will buy it again from Amazon whe it is back in stock.

I grew up on PCs, converted via a Macbook Pro to Mac in 2005, and am now converting back to PCs because of this little netbook. Upgraded to 2GB RAM, de-bloated, and stripped down to the basics this computer runs like a dream and can handle a pretty demanding load. Like other reviewers have said, when you get this clean all the bloat off the system, install an extra GB of RAM, and upgrade to Home Premium. I do anthropological fieldwork and this is great for working on Office, uploading raw audio files, storing audio and video for entertainment, and uploading pictures and viewing them. I even uploaded HD video from my camcorder and edited it while in Africa. The last time I did fieldwork with my Mac it overheated and the battery broke. It also slugged through 50 minutes of battery life. This computer, however, charges very fast and stays charged for 10-12 hours. Even after 9 months, I'm still getting 8-9 hours out of this. It runs cool, runs long, and never crashes.

My only complaint is in the actual structure of the computer. Why can't ASUS sell a "premier" line of netbooks made from aluminum that don't feel so cheap? Seriously, I'd fork over an extra $100 for something that wasn't cheap plastic. I haven't had any problems with the thing breaking, but it gets smudges, scratches, and simply doesn't feel right. Also, like everyone else and their mothers have mentioned - take the gloss off the damn screen! Sitting down with this thing outside is a real headache. If only the damn gloss wasn't on the screen and the casing was a bit more substantial this would get five stars.

Overall its a decent netbook....Great battery life, screen has a great imaging display, but that's about it...I upgraded to 2gb RAM, which really didn't seem to do much...(Pandora cuts out when you click the mouse on other programs even with the upgrade)...the build quality is suspect, everything is so plastic and cheap feeling-the edges around the screen are sharp and unrefined...the buttons make a rattling noise when you type which is annoying when you're around other people (like in class)...Windows 7 starter sucks for the most part...you cant even change your wallpaper! But for 399 + 48.00 for 2gb ram, its the bottom of what I expected, no worse:Definitely did not blow away my expectations though