New Eee PC 901 in my hands

I recently bought an Asus Eee PC 901 in Redcoon. Great offer which made me buy it: 195 € plus 2 € and something (as I shared delivery fee with my colleague David).

If you follow my blog, you know that I played with the Acer Aspire One A150 that I gave to my wife last summer. I find the AAOne keyboard much more comfortable but I am getting used to the tinier keyboard of the Eee little by little. On the other hand, the new machine already has a 6-cell battery (I had to give a 6-cell battery to my wife for her AAOne as it barely lasted 1 hour and a half under Linpus Lite) and it lasts for over 6 hours in power saving mode while making use of WiFi and web browsing from time to time. I was at work so I could not make an intensive use of it.

The next test will be making the CPU suffer in High Performance Mode and see how autonomy decreases. Just for the sake of testing, as autonomy is a priority for me and Power Saving mode seems to be enough for browsing and editing simple docs.

One thing that I do not like is that the disk is divided and system partition goes easily full. For instance, I updated BIOS via Asus Updater and keyboard layout was lost. I launched kcontrol and changed keyboard layour from en-UK to es-ES and the keyboard model to A4Tech KBS-8. The terminal windows from which I launched kcontrol was indicating an error when changing keyboard layout. The reason was /dev/sda2 full so I gained some space by launching a sudo aptitude clean to remove cached .deb files.

I feel pretty comfortable with the default Xandros OS but partition layout might lead me to try other options as Easy Peasy, Windows or both O:-)

The Xandros OS is a bit better than AAOne's Linpus lite (at least for my taste). This machine also has a larger (16 GB vs 8 GB, plus the 4 GB internal flash) and a bit faster SSD disc, double amount of RAM (1 GB vs 512 MB), twice as much cells in the battery (plus a better energy management that leads to longer autonomy), same quality 1.3 Mpx web cam, Bluetooth support (gained in the AAOne thanks to a super tiny BT Dongle), and less size (with the inherent keyboard problems) but some more weight (due to the different size of the battery... they seem to equal when chaging AAOne's battery).

I'll keep reporting about my experiences with this machine.
So far I have fallen in love with it.