Heads up , new geek toy in the house. I pre-ordered an Asus EEEPC 1000 from Amazon about a month ago and as soon as I arrived in London I found it ready for me. For those of you not aware of the EEE series , they are ultra portable notebooks from Asus that have sold pretty well. The 1000 model is the best so far with many additional features , Intel’s Atom processor and many other improvements in comparison to older models.
Initial Disappointment
Unfortunately though , my disappointment had kicked in when I discovered a dead pixel on the screen. When you pre-order something you have anticipation to get it and when it comes to me , I want all my gadgets and toys ASAP and properly working. I let amazon know about this and they immediately sent someone to pickup the defective notebook but they couldn’t replace it since the specific model was out of stock. So what I ended up with was the 1000H which has an 80GB hard drive instead of a 40GB solid state drive.
A bit about the notebook
The EEE PC 1000H comes with a 1.6Ghz atom processor , 512MB memory , 80GB HDD , Intel shared 945 graphics adapter , a 92% sized proper laptop keyboard (which is quite comfortable) , 1.3 Megapixel camera on the top of the screen , multitouch trackpad (much like the mac) , a whopping 6600mAh battery and its a very very sturdy design that should last you a long time without a scratch.
The most important thing to notice is the difference from the 1000’s predecessors. The 7 and 9 series has smaller screens , lower specs and did not fill in for most things you would do with your “real” computer (you do want a real computer and not a misunderstanding of one). To be honest the biggest pro on the 1000 was the screen. It has a full 10″ LCD (matt finish) and can support decent resolutions and a 65Hz refresh rate.
As far as networking is concerned , it uses the Ralink chipsets for both Ethernet (FastEthernet 10/100) and Wireless-N for higher speeds when going wireless. Note that due to the nature of the licensing used for the kernel modules respective to the Ralink hardware , it will be a little bit more than just plug and play.
In the box
What seemed incredibly striking to me is that everything I took outside of the box while unwrapping was high quality. For the 365 GBP that I paid during the pre-order I didn’t know what to expect. In seems though that everything was good stuff , including the laptop , the petite battery charger , atomic fiber cloth and the protective sleeve.
The Operating System
This was the hardest part I believe. The 80GB version of the 1000 comes with Windows XP preinstalled. Knowing me the original operating system was a very temporary thing. Now to the important stuff to factor in choosing how to go about having a usable operating system on the 1000. I knew from the start that it would have been Linux so I opted in for Ubuntu as always. It all worked well but you can’t get a few things working out of the box. To get most things you need Adam’s Kernel which is available here . Note that you have to manually install the deb packages and then setup your repos. The truth is that I should have used my own custom stuff to keep things proper and tidy but this is only temporary , I want to get round to making a few other changes too such as getting down to ripping the Xandros default installation on the 1000 SSD version and take a few things from it and adapt it to a deb package (to make things like OSD work properly and Asus’s power saving software).
So far?
Well it’s doing pretty well actually. I was most impressed with Ralink’s wireless chipset , it seems very stable and it supports all wireless functions such as injection 
The keyboard required to “getting used to” , it was very comfortable and straight forward. For those of you wondering if the atom processor can really cut it I suggest you hold your breathe since I do quite a few things on the EEE such as divx video playback , wireless auditing and a few other bits and pieces. The battery life has given me a good 5 hours and 45 minutes which is very good for what it is. The design is sturdy , the finish of the plastic is nice and shiny and doesn’t seem to like scratches a lot.
Can we see?
(Of course you can. Just a minute let me clean my office desk.) Forgive the very hasty photographs , I only just took them.
Top view of the EEE PC 1000H
A comparison of the size of the notebook with an adult male hand.
Front view of the EEE PC 1000H (Sorry about the flare)
The keyboard is 92% the size of a standard notebook keyboard. No training was required to adapt to this keyboard.
The trackpad surface area is huge compared to the 1000's size.
A 1.3 Megapixel camera above the 10" LCD
The EEE 1000 features Intel's new atom processor
Marvel it's convinience
Why did I buy it?
Well the truth is that I bought it for those configuration sessions in data centers. It has a battery that lasts and can fit in strange places to ease things. It has all the conventional hardware and is ergonomic enough when compared to standard sized laptops. An additional advantage is how it fits everywhere and you can take it traveling without worrying that you have a full sized notebook to add to your luggage.
Why not something else?
Let’s face it. The thinkpad x300 is ugly as hell and has lousy support for Linux (at least for those that can’t be bothered to setup ACPI) , the macbook air is …thr right product but at the wrong time (or something) and everything else apparently is a copy of the Eee PC 1000.
Understanding the concept of a subnotebook.
There have been quite a few people mentioning that the Eee lacks sufficient hardware power. The truth is , it isn’t supposed to. I can’t understand why serious people blog about how IT SHOULD HAVE DONE A LOT BETTER or something along the lines of I WISH IT HAD A RADEON/GE FORCE. These people need to relax a little and understand that the concept of a sub-notebook has nothing of the sort on it’s agenda. A sub-notebook has more to do with portable computing than powerful computing.
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Great review of the EEE PC 1000H. One question though: You said the wireless chipset supports injection. Most of the information I am seeing says that it does not. Is this verified? Have you tried it? I know the chipset drivers currently support monitor mode, but I have not seen anyone getting packet injection working. A little more elaboration would be awesome. Thanks.
Hi Maz , This is a quote from the open source rx2×00 site.
“They provide all the features you could expect, such as encryption, traffic monitoring, frame injection and more. Legacy drivers however do not support HostAP nor wpa_supplicant, and some of them are not stable on SMP systems yet.”
I have tried deauth attacks in recent audits , it seems to work just fine. Who said it doesn’t work?