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Considering laptop purchase, ^H^H^H^H HP 2133

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ragnar

Sat Sept 06 2008, 03:19PM

Registered Member #63 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425

Hi all,
having never worked with anything other than the best roadkill PCs (currently P4), I'm looking at investing in a laptop to make better use of long commutes. I'm looking to use it as my main work PC, taking it with me pretty much like I take the contents of my intray everywhere (a bad habit).

My typical activities include office, eagle/protel, some toolpath generation and machining, some basic photo processing, and web development. Nothing less than 1024px would suffice for a minimum screen width (coding etc). XP Pro would be my (highly) preferred OS.

I had a perv at what's available, and the higher-end range of ASUS EEE PCs stood out, likely EEE PC 1000, 1000H, or 1000HD. I'm comfortable it would handle what I do.

Would anyone with an EEE PC care to share experience?

Any pleasant surprises or disappointments to report?

Was it a good investment?

Will the drivers/hardware get cranky and the balls drop off when I wipe the drive and install XP Pro?

MRacerxdl

Sat Sept 06 2008, 03:31PM

Registered Member #989 Joined: Sat Sept 08 2007, 02:15AM
Location: SÃ£o Paulo, Brazil
Posts: 476

I was Installed Windows XP Professional on a Asus eeePC (i dont remember what model, but it was one of the firsts) on Asus site it have all drivers for the windows xp, but I wasnt need anything, the chipset and drivers is all intel i810 and it find everything automatic on xp pro.

With newer eeePC's I think Asus shares the windows drivers, so it will not be a problem.

About the performance, that is very impressive for a tiny notebook, I have seen videos on youtube of that running high end games like Unreal Tournament and World of Warcraft perfectly, so it will be ok for all other applications. It is a very good investment.

The only think is the battery duration with wireless on, it stays only for one hour ~

Mads Barnkob

Sat Sept 06 2008, 04:22PM

Registered Member #1403 Joined: Tue Mar 18 2008, 06:05PM
Location: Denmark, Odense C
Posts: 1968

I must admit that I like the MSI wind U100 better, it just feels better, for the hardware its properly the same inside both.

the touchpad sucks on the MSI though and I advice an external mouse

MRacerxdl

Sat Sept 06 2008, 04:37PM

Registered Member #989 Joined: Sat Sept 08 2007, 02:15AM
Location: SÃ£o Paulo, Brazil
Posts: 476

That touchpad sucks on all such type notebooks, external mouse is the better option, but when you cannot have an external mouse, the touchpad is usefull.

...

Sat Sept 06 2008, 05:39PM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

Performance on those guys is pretty rocking, I have an 'old' 4 gig eeepc with the 7" screen hooked up to a real monitor/keyboard that I am using as a replacement for the p4 i used to use (my power usage dropped from 120w to 12w which is good when we are paying $.3/kw/hr!) and so far so good. Although right now I am still running the cut down xandros linux on it, with plans to put ubuntu (or maybe xubuntu, we will see how things go) sometime in the next few weeks since you have to build everything your self using xandros

One thing I found kind of interesting, this eeepc is running a 900MHz Pentium M processor, which I believe has been under clocked to 600MHz but it will still 'seem' about as fast as a 1.5-2GHz p4 just because it is a more efficient architecture (very similar to the core 2 saga of chips)

Overall though, I have had good experiences with my eeepc, although I am working on adding more hard drive space and internal bluetooth. The web runs great, it seems pretty dang stable, runs cold, and has a 2hr built in UPS.

Dave Marshall

Sun Sept 07 2008, 02:44AM

Registered Member #16 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 02:22PM
Location: New Wilmington, PA
Posts: 554

I'd strongly recommend you look at the MSI Wind, and HP2133. I've got a 2133 with a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of ram (120GB hard drive) The keyboard is *dramatically* better than the eee PC.

I tinkered fairly extensively with an eee PC. My biggest beefs were the crummy battery life, tiny amount of storage, and the keyboard was virtually unusable for any real typing. Overall performance while in use, page load speeds and such were pretty good though.

Dave

Bennem

Sun Sept 07 2008, 08:00AM

Registered Member #154 Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 04:28PM
Location: Westmidlands, UK
Posts: 260

I have the Eeepc 901 loaded with XP,
and whilst i agree that the small keyboard is not for any real typing,
its overall performance is great!
I just plan to add an internal bigger hard drive.

Mel

Ken M.

Sun Sept 07 2008, 06:59PM

Registered Member #618 Joined: Sat Mar 31 2007, 04:15AM
Location: Us-Great Lakes
Posts: 628

I don't have an eee, But I do hav an F7 series from asus. From past experiences with Asus relatd equipment is a positive one. I've only heard of a few motherboards being bad, but those were mostly Desktop motherboards, as far as laptops are concerned I've only had one issue and thats with the power saving modes conflicting with wireless hardware causing a Blue screen for Driver_power_state_failure, but you just need to turn off an option on the drive for some kind of power option and it fixes the issue. As far as battery life, I don't know of any laptops\notebooks with excellent life and good performance. I only get about 1.5hr's out of mine with full charge and max power saving mode, a freind with a toshiba satalite thats only 5months old only gets about 45mins-1hr and the only differences are I run a 17" screen and his is a 15" and the hard drive and memory. All in all I'd say the eee would probly be a good pc, but you may want to check out some others. As for xp, Windows is basicly cramming Vista down everyones throat, if you look at dell laptops, they only have 2 17" rather expensive ones that can even have xp put on them, I've also heard that a lot of drivers for hardware are being made to only run with vista, but I dunno. I've grown kinda used to vista, and it doesn't seem to have as many glitchs and problems as it did a year or so ago.

FastMHz

Mon Sept 08 2008, 11:36PM

Registered Member #179 Joined: Thu Feb 16 2006, 02:08AM
Location: Hagerstown, Maryland - Close to Prime Outlets
Posts: 287

I played with those Asus computers at MicroCenter...they're aren't bad, made pretty solid. Reminiscent of the good 'ol HP Omnibook 600 in size, but blows it out of the water in performance. I don't have one yet as I haven't the need.

Steve Conner

Tue Sept 09 2008, 09:44AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Hi guys,

Out of interest, are there any of the machines discussed that are fanless, have solid-state disks and run XP? I mostly leave my laptop hooked up to the stereo for listening to internet radio and MP3s in the living room. If I had something that ticked those three boxes, and I could plug in a high-quality USB audio interface, that would be awesome

*edit* I was wrong, looks like BBC IPlayer is now Flash based and works on Mac/Linux too - but I'd probably want XP anyway

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