Eee pc 1000HE

2009 Jun 21 ( 2 minutes )

I recently bought a netbook: Eee PC 1000HE, and so far I’m extremely happy with it.

I was searching a small device not too heavy (I have enough of breaking my shoulders with the laptop in the bag…) powerful enough to sustain development tasks (erlang, java, eclipse) and in some extent to support video playing (for encoding I can use something else obviously).

After talking with a few friends at work, they all said that any devices based on the Intel Atom processor must be really slow and completely useless for serious development (some even told me to get an Apple laptop …).

Well, I’m sorry to say but you were dead wrong dear friends. So far, this device is a pure pleasure to all my tasks.

First of all, it’s pre-installed with Windows XP which surprised me to not use every bit of memory I have (1G). Nonetheless I installed immediately an Ubuntu Linux next to it (better to have 2 systems up and running).

Once Ubuntu installed (the 9.04 version) surprise again to see all the goodies such as extra graphics effects or goofy animations working and not one frame every 5s.

I continued by installing java, eclipse, erlang and was delighted to see eclipse running without problems. Of course, the application is slower than you could imagine, but it’s not like the last comment I got: “Oh it will be so slow, it will be unusable”…

The last point I wanted to test was the long battery time claimed by the builder: 9.5 hours! OK I didn’t really reach that, but I never really let me run for that long to begin with. Now What I can say is after let it charge during the night, I picked it up during the morning, switched it on (it was around 7am), put it in my bag in suspend mode, use it during the day (mixed periods of use and suspended mode) and finally came back home with more than 40% left!!!

At this point you are indeed wireless! So, after a whole week of use, I’m just in love with this small device which finally doesn’t break my shoulder (3.2lbs). Oh yes, by the way, I’m writting this post from it ;) see you around.