| Eee PC 1000HE arrived | Created: 31.05.2009 12:35 |
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As sort of a reward for finally doing my tax papers, I got
myself an ASUS Eee PC 1000HE. That is an 10 inch Netbook with
an Atom N280, 160 GB HDD and 1 GB RAM - and not to forget:
a non-glossy display. Unfortunately, unlike its predecessor
the 1000H, it is only available with Windows XP home
preinstalled. But as the hardware is practically identical
to the 1000H except the slightly faster CPU and the larger
battery, Linux works flawlessly on it. With
Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix
everything works out of the box, including suspend to RAM and
disc, WLAN, even the Webcam. What is particularily attractive on this netbook is the long battery life. ASUS claims 9.5 hours, but of course they measure that under Windows, with a display brightness of 40% and everything, including WLAN, disabled. That is not a very realistic usage scenario for me, so first thing for me after installing Linux was to make my own measurements of the battery runtime. In both tests, bluetooth and the builtin webcam were deactivated in the BIOS. In both tests, WLAN was on, but the actual network connection was through cable. Display brightness was set to 60 to 70 percent. That in my opinion is "normal brightness" for the rather good display, i.e. the brightness you would use if you want to actually see something and not preserve battery life. Turning the display up to 100 percent does not make sense, it's just too bright. The first test was basically "idleing". All that was running was an IRC client. Normal power saving was active, so it did dim and turn off the screen eventually. In this scenario, the battery lasted for 7.5 hours before reaching "critically low" level. The system then went into "Suspend to RAM" as configured. I was able to wake it up from there another 1.5 hours later. I find both the runtime and the fact that it lasts for ages in the Suspend mode pretty impressive. The (De*l) laptop I have from work hardly lasts two hours and only few minutes more in "Suspend to RAM". The second test was sort of a "worst case" scenario: Playing back a video (recording of a DVB-S stream at around 900 KByte/sec in pal plus) while running burnMMX in the background. The video was too large to fit into cache, so it was actually read from the hard disc, meaning the disc was not under stress, but could not go to sleep either. The fan was pretty loud during that test, in fact I haven't got it to turn up this far during normal use. But even in this very exaggerated scenario, it survived for 4.5 hours. There is something I do not like though: You cannot currently buy any (original) spare batteries for the 1000HE - "the internet" tells me ASUS always takes many months to release the spare parts. Bottom line: I really like my new netbook, and I find it a shame that I have to read on heise.de that ASUS seems to have plans to discontinue the 1000HE in favor of a new model with a crappy glossy display and less battery life (sorry, article is in german). How braindead can managers be? No wait - not only since the banking crisis that is a rhethorical question. |
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