Buying ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - 9.5 Hour Battery Life

I bought this netbook for one main reason... writing at the local coffee shop in the mornings.

This works great for that. In fact, having large hands with pudgy fingers, I was a little concerned that I'd have issues typing. Nope... after just a short while my fingers are totally used to the keyboard with maybe one minor exception. Hitting the right-hand "shift" key is sometimes a problem. Other than that, great.

The touchpad IS an issue, however. In general I don't like touchpads but this one gets a little in the way. The palm of my hand often touches it and sends the cursor flying and then forcing the text cursor to pop up somewhere other then where I was originally typing. This is actually quite frustrating and unless you are one of those rare typists who hold the palms of their hands up off of the surface then you are likely to have the same issue. (why does NO ONE create a laptop with the touchpad directly in the center of the keyboard!!??)

There is a way around this, however, go into the control panel... go to the mouse controls and check off the "Disable when external USB mouse plug(ed)in" and then... USE A MOUSE! Targus has a nice little mouse with a reel-up cord... works nicely. I'd rather use a mouse anyway. In anycase, when a USB mouse is plugged in then the touchpad is disabled... problem solved.

Next issue... The screen is a 1024px X 600px screen which is not a standard resolution. Resolution settings are 800x600, 1024x600 and 1024x"768"... SEE THAT... Some apps n websites do not want to work at the 1024x600 setting. But the 1024x768 setting goes beyond the border of the monitor... this means that, for instance, if you are at the Windows' desktop then you have to push the mouse cursor down BEYOND the bottom of the screen to get to the taskbar. If you are in an application window then you have to, again, push the mouse cursor down beyond the screen bottom to get the bottom of the Windows' application window.

Not good!

BUT... they have a work-a-round for that. They have a compressed 1024x768 mode which squishes the height of the 768 pixel window into the 600 pixels of the screen.

For the most part this works but there are often situations where this is problematic. Photos are squished looking... perfect circles are no longer perfect... and some text is hard to read.

Lastly... Once I tried to use the power adaptor and it didn't work! No blue light on the power block and no "charging" info on the task bar, only a battery usage symbol. I was frantic! LATER, about an hour or so later I tried again and this time the battery started charging and the blue light on the power supply lit. I have since read other reports of this happening so it SEEMS to be an issue.

Oh yes... ONE MORE THING... ASUS has not yet responded to TWO support requests sent two weeks ago! How can they just IGNORE their tech tags like that??????

Overall the ASUS netbook has done the job that I purchased it for. It has a LONG battery life and I no longer have to find a wall plug-in for a laptop everytime I want to write or go online somewhere other than home.

I transferred the WordPerfect installation disc to a thumbdrive and installed it from there... worked great that way.

This is NOT the unit that you'd want if you need to do most other tasks though so keep that in mind. Writing, email and occasional internet browsing is what it is best for.Get more detail about ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - 9.5 Hour Battery Life.