I have never really been a fan of netbooks, although they are small cheap computers, I have always thought of them as slow and useless for anything other than light web browsing and writing the occasional document. Whilst watching some reviews on YouTube of the Lenovo X220 ultra-portable notebook I came across a couple of videos of the Asus Eee PC 1015 series of netbooks and to be perfectly honest I was amazed at how much they have changed in recent years. Whenever I think of a netbook I think of something like the Asus Eee PC 700 or 900 series which in 2007 and 2008 were very popular indeed. Although popular they were of no use to me at all, about the only thing I would of used one for is running SSH terminals and the lightest of web browsing, checking webmail etc. Now however netbooks have changed in a big way, they are still cheap small computers but they have so much more capability. I decided to buy one.
The Asus Eee PC 1015PX seems to be available in a couple of configurations so make sure you know what you are buying when comparing prices. My Eee PC came with the following configuration.
10.1″ LED Backlight WSVGA (1024×600) Screen
1.66 Ghz Dual Core Intel® Atom™ N570 Processor
Intel GMA 3150 Graphics
1GB DDR3 RAM
250GB SATA Hard Drive
WLAN 802.11 b/g/n@2.4GHz
Bluetooth V3.0
0.3 MP Webcam
1 x VGA Connector
3 x USB 2.0
1 x LAN RJ-45
1 x Audio Jack (Headphone or Mic)
1 x Card Reader : SD/ SDHC/ MMC
1 x 6 Cell 56Wh Battery
Dimensions:W262xD178xH23.6 to 36.4mm
Weight: 1.25kg
Upon opening box I got really excited, not at my nice shiny new netbook but at its AC Power Adaptor, it’s tiny! It’s not much bigger than the average phone charger. There’s nothing worse than getting a small notebook and opening the box to find a power brick that’s bigger than the notebook is. And just in the off chance you’re wondering just like I was its multi-voltage, 100-240V 50/60Hz.
Now to the Netbook itself, My first thought was that I have never seen so much protective plastic on a notebook computer before, usually it’s just a piece of thin foam placed between the screen and the keyboard but this had plastic everywhere, even the screen hinges were covered in plastic and you can barely even see them. With all the plastic removed I was pleasantly surprised at how stylish it looked. It didn’t look or feel cheap like I was expecting.
On the left side are Power, VGA and 1 USB Port
On the right side are 10/100 Ethernet Port, Kensington Lock Slot, 2 USB Ports, a shared Headphone/Mic Jack and an SD/SDHC/MMC Media Card Reader.
A look at the bottom shows the access for the RAM, the battery and the Licence Key for Windows 7 Starter
After powering on the netbook and going through the usual windows 7 first run screen, I was annoyed to find all the usual bloatware installed, I of course expected it. The hard drive was partitioned into 3 partitions, one for the system, one for data the other was a recovery partition. I did my usual trick of just deleting all the partitions and used my own windows 7 installation and the drivers from the Asus website. I would recommend not deleting the recovery partition unless you a) know what you’re doing and b) have your own Windows 7 installation disc and licence. Also of course netbooks don’t have optical drives so you also need a second computer to make a bootable USB Flash Drive.
Once into a fresh install of windows I installed Firefox and VLC player and started doing a little testing. First off I tried watching YouTube, it played 720p video flawlessly and to my surprise it also managed YouTube at 1080p. I then started watching some 720p podcasts from Revision3 which again played flawlessly. Finally I tried watching some 1080 24p footage straight from a Sony NX5 Camcorder and as expected it wouldn’t play smoothly. This is to be expected… It is after all a netbook.
I then tried out the 0.3MP webcam, and as expected its crap, I know netbooks are low cost but I don’t see any reason why Asus couldn’t have put a 720p webcam in it. The webcam is actually so bad that I disabled its driver so I’m not tempted to use it.
One of my favourite parts of this netbook is the keyboard, of course keyboard choices are different for everyone but for me this is one of the best keyboards I have ever used. I have medium to large size hands and its small size doesn’t really bother me at all, it takes a few hours of typing to get used to but I could type on it all day long without much difficulty.
The screen resolution of 1024×600 took a little getting used to, for some people I would imagine it would very irritating, but up until recently I had been using a 1024×762 monitor on my desktop for years so it doesn’t seem to bother me all that much.
The built in speakers aren’t all that good, for a start they are in the bottom so you get a muffled sound. However testing the audio with my Sony MDR-7506 headphones I was pleasantly surprised, it sounds great up until the very maximum volume and then you get a slight bit of noise and distortion, but it’s perfectly fine for most peoples listening needs.
When the battery was fully charged I started experimenting with battery life, with the screen brightness at its lowest setting and WLAN & Bluetooth switch off and using the power saver setting I proceeding to watch 7 hours of podcasts from Revision3 before I had to use AC power again which I thought was impressive. The next day I tried another test of just light web browsing again with the lowest brightness and WLAN and Bluetooth switched off. To my surprise I only got 8 hours and 30 minutes out of it. Nowhere close to the 11 hours Asus suggest and that’s supposed to be with WLAN and Bluetooth switched on. I have been using it for a few days now and have yet to see more than 8.5 hours out of it. As of right now I’m writing this review in Word with nothing else running not even antivirus and again the lowest screen brightness, WLAN & Bluetooth switched off and its using 6.5 watts. If you take the 56 watt hour battery and divide it by 6.5 watts you only get 8.6 hours.
Clearly ASUS never did any real life testing what so ever and just took figures from other Eee models, either that or they just blatantly lied to sell more netbooks. If they’d of advertised an 8 hour battery life I’d still have purchased this netbook. All this being said there is one way of gaining some extra battery life and that is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. Unfortunately there is no external access to the hard drive so you actually have to take the netbook apart to do that. Which I’ll show you how in a future post. Even with a solid state drive I’m only expecting about 10 hours of battery life.
For a netbook I was surprised at how effective the cooling is, I know it’s not generating that much waste heat to begin with but normally when manufactures design low power electronics they skimp on the cooling because they can. Considering the hard drive is right below the keyboard there is no noticeable heat from above the keyboard, it all seems to come from the side vent like it should. This netbook is fan cooled and it’s very quiet too.
Overall I’m impressed with the performance for its low price. The included 1GB of RAM is ok for light usage but for what little money it costs to upgrade it to 2GB its well worth doing. It’s also worth mentioning that the maximum amount of supported RAM is 2GB as with most netbooks, this is a hardware limitation and not an operating system limitation. I have seen a few posts on forums of people who are under the impression 4GB will work if they upgrade from Windows 7 Starter, this is not true!