ASUS EeePC 900 (Windows XP)

ASUS’ EeePC range has gone off like wildfire. Its current EeePC 900, which has an enlarged 8.9-inch matte screen, is its latest crack at the netbook market but it may have left its run a little too late, as we explain.

While the keyboard is too small to touch type effectively on, ASUS were smart enough to put the 'Ctrl' button on the outer edge of the keyboard with the 'Fn' located next on the right. This avoids the annoying habit of pressing 'Fn' instead of 'Ctrl' that we've seen appear on other netbooks. The 'Fn' button provides a shortcut to additional keys normally found on full-size keyboards, as well as quick and handy shortcuts to the Windows Task Manager, sleep mode, brightness, volume and wireless connectivity.

ASUS' Power Meter application sits on your system tray and shows the amount of battery life in percentage terms. It strangely gives you the option to display the status of multiple batteries, even though the EeePC can only take one battery. Also on the system tray is ASUS' EeePC Tray Utilities which provides a shortcut to change screen resolutions and toggling the wireless LAN and camera.

Starting up the EeePC was quick and took around 30 seconds to get right into Windows. Putting it into sleep mode and waking it up again was done in a matter of seconds. These speedy times can be attributed to the EeePC's 12GB of flash based storage. But the storage gets cut down to 11.22GB of usable space once it’s ready to go, and is not nearly enough for the amount of data people are hauling around with them these days. Sure you have the SD memory card slot for expandable storage, but it becomes a hassle for people such as photographers, that prefer to offload photos from their SD cards onto the EeePC. Another minor complaint is that the USB ports on the EeePC are a bit stiff once USB devices have been plugged in, so stiff that we were able to lift up the EeePC with a USB flash drive connected.