Asus Eee PC 1000H

King-size netbook is a comfortable winner



ASUS LAUNCHED the "netbok" category with its popular Eee PC 4G, which was quickly eclipsed by offerings from competitors such as Acer, HP, and MSI. Now, Asus has fired back with the Eee PC 1000H, a bigger, more powerful unit that adds a touch-typable keyboard, a nicer screen, a larger hard drive, and better performance to the successful Eee formula.

The machine is definitely the heavyweight of the netbook category, measuring 1.5 inches high at its thickest point, 10.5 inches wide, and 7.5 inches deep, and weighing 3.2 pounds (with a six-cell battery). That said, it still closer in size and heft to other netbooks than to full-features ultraportables, and it's more portable thatn standard-size notebooks.

The extra size buys you some real advantages, such as a bright 10-inch 1,024x600-pixel LED-backlit screen; a keyboard large enough for touch typists with big fingers, though the odd placement of the up-arrow key between the right Shift key and the forward slash takes some getting used to; and a fine multitouch touch pad, which is unfortunately armed with ridiculously stiff buttonns.

The Eee PC 1000H uses Intel's Atom N270 low-power mobile processor, and it has 1GB of RAM-sufficient for running the OS, Windows XP Home Edition, and most light tasks (you can expand it to as much as 2GB). The audio is the best we've heard from a netbook, making this a viable entertainment center when you're on the road. The Eee PC 1000H we tested features a generous 80GB hard drive, which can be expanded using the SDHC memory-card slot and three USB ports, though there's no ExpressCard or PC Card slot. Expansion is rounded out by a 10/100 Ethernet port, VGA out, and headphone and microphone jacks.

Other handy features include a utility to enable or disable 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or the 1.3-megapixel Webcam; several power-saving modes that allow you to balance performance and battery usage to your liking; and three screen resolution modes (including the unusual 1,024x600 and 1,024x768 "LCD Compress") to make the most of th esmallish display.

The lack of an optical drie prevented us from running our usual DVD rundown test, but the Eee lsted 5 hours and 48 minutes doing a variety of tasks with Wi-Fi disabled. In more typical usage with Wi-Fi enabled, we averaged about 4 hours and 45 minutes per charge.-Denny Atkin

What's the Deal?
Asus zooms back into the netbook market with the Eee PC 1000H, a slightly larger and more powerful version of the model that created the new category of laptop earlier this year.
What it's for: Very basic notebook functions, such as typing documents and surfing the Web, that don't require huge amounts of processing power.
Who it's for: People looking for a supplementary system or one for their children, or those who know they won't need to run complex applications that require intensive computing resources.
What's included: Intel Atom processor; 1GB of RAM; and an 80GB hard drive, on which Windows XP Home Edition comes preinstalled. (Another version offers Linux as an alternate OS.)



The bottom line: If you're been looking to enter the netbook fray but have been afraid to give up the benefits offered by larger laptops, the Eee PC 1000H could be the no-compromises compromise you've been waiting for.

Computer Shopper November 2008