Spoilt child of the west
I tried to sell my Asus 701 (4g surf) a few months ago, because I wanted to upgrade to a model with a better battery life and larger screen. I put it up on Marktplaats (Dutch equivalent of eBay), but couldn’t get the price I wanted for it. So I left it at that.
At our office Christmas party on Friday, our CEO (and lead singer of the office band…) made a brief speech in which he announced (among other things) that everybody under contract would receive a laptop. What he held in his hand looked like a white Asus to me. First of all, I was stunned. What a great pressie! Then I crossed fingers hoping it would be a different model from the one I already had. It was.
It isn’t quite the upgrade I’d originally planned (I’d had my eye on a 1000H), but an upgrade nevertheless. The laptop we got, a choice of a black or white model, is that odd fish in Asus’ product line, the 900A. It’s basically a 901 with less HD-space and no Bluetooth. It has a 16gb solid state disk, 1GB of RAM, and it has the webcam that I didn’t have on the 701 surf.
I’ve been playing with it and tweaking it since the minute I got home from the party. First of all, I added the advanced desktop mode (as explained in my older post about the Asus eeepc 701), which unlocks the eeepc from its default ‘dummy’ interface. Then I tried to change the OS language from Dutch to English. I don’t like localised software, translations are often awkward and it makes it harder to find solutions for your software related problems. Unfortunately, in advanced desktop mode changing the locale doesn’t work completely, the menu dialogs now show a mixture of Dutch and English. There are further instructions on the eeeuser wiki, but so far I’ve had no luck. I really should learn a bit more about Linux.
I am very happy with the machine. They keyboard is more responsive than the one on my 701, the wider (8′.9”) screen is perfect (the 701’s 8 inch screen was a bit sucky, horizontal scrolling’s no fun). The 900a has problems connecting to WPA-secured wifi, but 1. some of my neighbours have open networks and 2. I switched my own to WEP, I’m not that bothered. No problem connecting to WEP at all.
I haven’t given the battery life a real test yet. It came with the same 4400 mAh battery as my 701 (which lasts only an hour and a half on a full charge), but the 900a has a different processor (Intel Atom) which is supposed to be less draining. I may invest in a 6600 mAh anyway, I think they’re about 75 euro and last 5 or more hours on a charge.
Thanks to my employers for an inspired choice - I don’t want to say ‘Best. Pressie. Ever.’, but… oh what the hell: Best. Pressie. Ever.



