Asus - Eee PC Netbook with Intel® Atom™ Processor - Midnight Blue

I got this for Christmas, and I found it to be very easy to setup. I simply plugged in the charger and waited for it to be charged. After it was done, it gave me a little setup wizard to help me. Eventually, I just played with it and experimented with things like the webcam. The problem I found with the webcam was that there's no way for me to edit my pictures or take video. I then downloaded some software for those problems and I was good. Also, you need a very well lit area to take a picture. It is very hard to see anything without light from all angles. My long fingers had no problem getting used to this slightly smaller keyboard. The only problem is that you need to lift your wrists up and away from the rest of the computer when typing. The touch pad detects your wrists touching it and moves your mouse (and clicks) onto another paragraph. If you're one to rarely look up at your screen, you may want to get used to this fast. The speed on this is very satisfactory. It's very responsive, though sometimes lags a little when you have many windows open at the same time. This is a habit of mine, I don't close anything after I'm done with it. I guess this is helping me break my habit. I am quite impressed with this screen. The sharp quality of it is amazing. The only problem is that when I'm trying to look at my email and I have to keep scrolling around to see the whole picture. I have found a solution for this, though. You can press Control (Ctrl) - (Minus) to make the screen smaller, and Ctrl + to zoom in. Overall, I am quite impressed with this netbook. With the few problems it has, I have been able to find ways to overcome them. By the way, I'm younger than 14. (My mom's account)

I bought this netbook as a result of having to compete over my home computer with my wife and kids. I didn't want to pay close to a 'notebook' price which was a key factor in choosing this netbook. I was looking for something that I could check internet and maybe play a light game or two. After doing research, I saw most netbooks have similiar specs with the major differences being operating system and battery life. After having it for a month, I can say this netbook was the ticket. It's built well and runs great. I don't put a lot on the hard drive and installed a light browser (Chrome) and the lightest Antivirus I could find (Avast...it's free too). At $250, I think I got a solid machine. In terms of cons, the only downside for me right now is I wish I had a bit more battery. It lasts almost 4 hours and I knew coming into the purchase that it was only a 3 cell. Cost was more important to me at the time and looking back I still like the purchase. The only other negative I have heard about is the AC adapter power brick dying after a couple of months. If you read these reviews you will see some have complained about this issue. Though I haven't had any issues, I will say I don't like the jack that plugs into the computer. It is L shaped and I worry it's going to get bent out of shape and not work. Overall this is a solid computer for the price that I paid and don't regret this purchase. If you're looking for a basic portable computer to do minor everyday tasks like email and internet and are fine with a battery life of 3.5-4 hours, you can't go wrong...especially at $250.

Overall, this is a good little netbook. I think it would be nice if the vendor through in a sleeve for it, as those are pretty cheap now. I like the wireless N card (actually does work fast), the built-in webcam, the SDHC card reader and the keyboard. I'm occasionally booting to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed on an SD card and that's pretty cool. Here are my concerns/suggestions: 1. The battery life with wireless on and continuous use is about 2 1/2 hours max, which isn't horrible, but not great. 2. The surface around the display and keyboard (piano black) will easily show your finger smudges, so expect to live with that or constantly clean it. 3. By default, the Eeepc goes into sleep mode very quickly, so you may wish to change those settings. 4. On first boot, the system asks you if you want to register with Microsoft. You must have a wired network connection at that point to do so. 5. There are at least 150MB worth of Microsoft updates to do right away. If you want to minimize this, UNINSTALL the demo version of Microsoft Office FIRST. 6. By default, FAST BOOT is enabled. This is SO annoying, because it basically disables the boot menu if you wish to boot from an alternate source (such as the SD card). You must go into the BIOS (F2), disable fast boot, then reboot the systems and pres ESC to get to a boot menu. If you're looking for great battery life, spend the extra $30 to $50 for the 6-cell battery. If you buy the battery alone, it will set you back about $80.

This is a nice little netbook. Its not heavy the screen could be a little bigger though i often have to zoom in and out from time to time. The speed is not bad for something this small as long as you dont try anything heavy on it like games & stuff. Also all that norton stuff & microsoft office i had to take out. I put in my AVG free antivirus which works just as well , i put in my open office ( its just as good and free). i dont use IE i use Firefox which is lighter & better on the processor. And i put in aslogics defrag which i think is better than the windows one and my Ccleaner which basically does the job as disk cleanup but in 1/4th of the time. i also tweaked the visual settings to use less ram & stuff. after all that my little netbook was running perfectly. all i can say for the webcam is that its decent.

Once we finally got the netbook (BB sent out a 20 in monitor instead) it setup pretty easy. Not very much bloatware to remove, that was nice. The battery life isn't as long as you would hope for. The keyboard feels a little cheap and makes a "clack" noise when you type. On the plus side, the keyboard isn't' so small that you are constantly making typos. Having XP instead of Win7 starter is actually a plus in my opinion because of the limitations imposed by Win7 starter. This computer really needs 2 GB of RAM to have the speed even a normal user would want. My 10 year old son uses this and sometimes complains about its lack of responsiveness. If you get any netbook I would recommend at least 2 GB of RAM. XP runs much smoother with 2GB. The screen resolution is 1024x600 and it feels a little small but the 1024x768 resolution will require you to scroll the desktop up and down. A pretty decent Netbook especially for the price ($249). The worst part was the mis-sent item right before Christmas but BB fixed it after we had to make multiple calls. For some reason nobody could understand that we got a monitor instead and needed the netbook resent along with a pre-paid shipping label so we could send the monitor back.

My husband wanted to buy me a laptop for Christmas and we went into Best Buy to purchase one, but the sales guy recommended going with this instead, because I was only using it for games/internet, he advised me it was a better quality then the lap top that I picked out and said that he had the older model and never had any issues with it. I was really uneasy about buying this product that I rarely ever heard of the brand, usually I would go for HP, Dell or even Toshiba, but never ever heard of ASUS before, but the price was great the appearance was something that I really liked. It's small, lightweight and very trendy looking, so I said what the heck, lets just get it. We got it home and I instantly fell in love with it. Regardless of the internet connection and games running better than my normal computer. It has a built in camera and Skype installed on the desktop, which I absolutely loved this feature, because I can speak to people out of town or even my sister over the computer instead over the phone. I would recommend this product to anyone. My friend actually bought the same one for his wife and she loves it too. You won't be disappointed.

My 2 year old HP laptop started giving issues so it was time to replace. I was split between a netbook or laptop but decided on a netbook. Researched and noticed for basic use there was no difference between 1Gb or 2 (Still might upgrade, who knows), I never used the 120Gb I had in the laptop, and all of the netbooks rate about the same. So the base model that I got at $249 was a good choice. As for Windows 7 starter, it would have cost me 50 bucks more, so I got this with XP SP3, which does what I need it to do. I also found out after the fact that Win 7 Starter supposedly won't play a DVD off of an external drive, but XP will. Go figure. So the unit works great. However, I usually don't get extended service plans but I got it on this unil for two reasons. #1 is that there are reports of the Asus Netbooks having questionable reliability, especially the power cord/supply and display. My buddy bought an Asus netbook when they first came out about 7 months ago and he has had no issues, so that's not a good reason in and of itself. However, reason #2 is that for the $59 you give for the plan, they cover the whole unit (minus abuse) including one free battery replacement, which is $48 in and of itself. Believe me, if you use it the way I do, you WILL eat a battery in two years. Get the service plan because if you figure in the battery @ 48 bucks, you are only giving 11 bucks for the service plan. Now for the unit itself. It works great. Once you get used to the small footprint, you learn to love the ease and portability. Also, the touchpad expands and contracts the display size in apps as well as does a two finger scroll and rotate. Finally, as long as you don't try to open up a large number of apps simultaneously, the unit runs every bit as fast as my old duel core Vista laptop, perhaps even faster. The unit is also one of the smartest netbooks in regards to power and this Asus unit combined with XP conserves power like a treehugger. Don't spend more than this on a netbook. This is all you'll need.

I have enjoyed using this netbook after owning it for about four weeks. It was easy to set up and easy to use. Some people seem to have unrealistic expectations for netbooks. I use mine for email, websurfing and word processing. I rarely save to the hard drive since I generally need to move things to another computer. I bought this to supplement my main computer which has much more memory and I use to run statistical programs that require a lot of RAM. If you just surf the web, check email, and type papers, then this will suffice. If you're going to start adding significant amounts of music and video to the computer, you should probably upgrade to something more powerful. It worked fast enough when on the internet to satisfy me and wireless was easy to connect. I wish it had an exterior switch to turn off the wireless card like my laptop does, but it is easy to turn off the wireless in the icon tray. My biggest problem was adjusting to the small screen. But I think that is a personal issue because I"m used to much larger monitors. After using the netbook for a week while out of town, it bothered me less. But the small screen is the trade-off for the size and convenience. Another issue is using the track pad to zoom in and out. I never managed to get the hang of it. It's easy to use it to move the mouse around, but zooming seems more difficult. Finally, the computer seems difficult to keep clean. Any oil on your fingers, gets on the computer. I found that spraying glass cleaner on a paper towel and then wiping off the outer surface and interior shiny surfaces (not the monitor!) kept things clean, but it is a minor irritation if you're trying to look professional and your computer has fingerprints all over it.