Three Reasons That the Asus Eee 900 Is Not for Students

I am writing this on an Asus Eee 900. I have had it since Thursday to do a review. I will preface these remarks by saying that I have been a fan of the Asus Eee line. It is a terrific idea, if the little machine is used in the right setting. Unfortunately, this is not a machine for students. Here are three basic reasons why I would not recommend this Asus Eee 900 for academic work:

• the keyboard remains a problem. It is fine for making a brief note or two. However, if this is for a lecture setting, then it becomes a problem. It is tiring to use. And, if you know how to type by touch, this will lead to multiple errors. If you are a hunt-and-peck typist, this will be a tiring machine to use. Posture will be a problem. There may be a few surprising aches and pains with long term use of this machine.
• the battery life is an unpleasant surprise. The battery on this machine that I am using is relatively new. It has been ‘out-of-the-box’ for less than two weeks. If a student is intending to use this machine for two consecutive one hour classes, then it would be problematic. The battery life on this machine would be struggling as the two hour mark approaches. That is disappointing. - I did check to see if this was a problem specific to this machine. Six other people with the Asus Eee 900 report that is this approximately the expectations from the battery.
• the costs remain high. The costs of the Asus Eee 900 may be dropping. Any price point that I could quote here would not be valid in a few days. The price range, though, is comparable to a full sized laptop - or close enough that it bears serious consideration.

The Asus Eee line has many positive attributes, like the speed of boot up and the security of the solid state disk. In some settings, the Asus Eee machines would be ideal. However, there are too many basic fundamental concerns to recommend this to students for use in an academic setting.

Catherine Forsythe

Hitachi: A 500 GB Laptop Hard Drive

It is another step towards huge storage capacity for laptops. Hitachi is at the 500 GB level:

“…The Travelstar 5K500, which is the highest capacity drive yet developed for portable PCs, is due to begin shipping in February and should go some way towards quenching user thirst for storage space.

“…The 5,400-rpm drive offers a 5.5-millisecond average latency and 12-millisecond average read time. It comes with a SATA (Serial ATA) interface that supports 3Gbps data transfer although this drops to 1.5Gbps when the optical disc encryption is turned on. The drive consumers 0.95 watts at idle and 0.7 watts at low-power idle, which is only slightly more than Hitachi’s previous two platter laptop drives, Swezey said.”

link: Hitachi unveils first laptop 500GB drive

The four hundred dollar price point seems to be a bit expensive, especially compared to an external hard drive system. While an external hard drive system does not add to the portability, it does add flexibility with instantaneous changes of storage systems. The one pessimistic thought about such laptop hard drive storage space is that a loss of data on such a machine could trigger a monstrous security breach. It could expose millions and millions of sensitive files to identity theft.

Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster