#1: ASUS Eee PC 1015PED-PU17-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - Up to 13 Hours of Battery Life Reviews!
Before I go into the details, let me just say this is a great little netbook. I am very happy with the purchase. So here we go...
First, this netbook DOES NOT have USB 3.0. Asus has done a great job of confusing everyone about this. Some early reports indicated it would have USB 3.0. The Asus website says, "Availability is dependent on selected model, country or operator support. Check with your local ASUS website for more details." Say what?!? And to top it off, the Asus support site has a USB 3.0 driver. Well, USB 3.0 ports are blue and the 1015PED I purchased does not have any blue ports. When I load the USB 3.0 driver, it says "No USB 3.0 chip found". I would love to be wrong about this but I don't think I am.
Next, there is an option to backup the recovery information to a USB stick when you hit F9 at boot. WARNING: Restoring the backup from the USB stick DOES NOT create a true factory hard drive image. It DOES NOT restore the recovery partition or Express Gate! If you restore from the USB stick, you lose the recovery partition for good! You can no longer hit F9 and restore from the hard drive and the Express Gate button will not work. You will only be able to restore from the USB stick and it will create one big partition with Windows 7 Starter and all the wonderful bloatware. Also, the manual says you need a USB stick greater than 16GB. False... The backup only takes 10GB.
I needed to run some legacy apps so I dumped Windows 7 Starter and loaded Windows XP Pro. Although I download most of my drivers directly from the chip manufacturers, I still have to give Asus credit for putting all XP drivers on their support site! Well, almost all the drivers... As of this writing, there's no BlueTooth driver. However, I discovered the Dell DW375 BlueTooth module driver will work fine. (Broadcom doesn't make their Widcomm BlueTooth drivers available to end users. Lame...)
So, have you ever loaded XP from a USB stick??? 1) Write zeros to the 1015PED HD with WDC DLG. 2) Create a bootable BartPE USB stick and don't forget the AHCI drivers or the ramdisk from Windows Server 2003 SP1. 3) Slipstream the AHCI drivers into XP SP3 using nLite and copy the i386 directory to the BartPE USB stick. 4) Partition the HD using diskpart and format with A43. 5) Install XP, load the drivers and updates and you're done. Congratulations! You now have a masters degree in computer science!!!
Now for some pros/cons/etc.
Battery life - Wow! It's kind of impossible to say how many hours it will last for you because people will use this machine differently. That said, I'm very impressed with the battery life for my application. It doesn't come close to 13 hours but I didn't expect it to. The application I'm running is continuously CPU and graphic intensive.
The matte screen - Very nice. I specifically wanted a matte screen because I plan to use it outside quite a bit. The screen is still washed out in sunlight but it's much better than a glossy screen which you can barely see at all.
Speed - Not sure. It's hard for me to compare the performance to other netbooks. Obviously, a clean copy of XP blows away the bloated version of Windows 7 Starter that it came with. I would guess all Atom netbooks are fairly close. For what it's worth, I'm happy with the performance.
Touch pad - It's great! It's large and the touch pad software supports quite a few gestures that make it easy to navigate.
Keyboard - Ummm... I'm ultra picky on my keyboards. I like keyboards with concave, textured keys with a long travel and weak finger pressure compensation. Needless to say, I hate this keyboard. However, I don't hate it anymore than any other netbook I've used.
No LED for caps lock! Yet we have TWO power LEDs?!? Asus uses a program called CapsHook to alert you when the caps lock key is pressed. Just what we need... another program to take up memory and CPU on a resource limited netbook.
Video performance - Weak by design. YouTube 480 full screen at best. Forget about 720. But this netbook wasn't designed for video. You already knew that, right?
As someone else mentioned, the outside of the case is matte and the inside is shiny. Asus should have stayed with the matte theme throughout.
I actually like some of the function (Fn) buttons Asus puts on the keyboard. In particular, they have one for Task Manager and one to cut the LCD backlight.
All the stickers where you rest your palms came off fairly easy with no residual residue. The Atom and Windows 7 stickers put up a fight but they eventually came off.
So yes... I got what I wanted: A netbook with long battery life and a matte screen with decent performance. If this is what you're looking for, I highly recommend the Asus 1015PED.
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ASUS Eee PC 1015PED-PU17-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - Up to 13 Hours of Battery Life Features
- Intel Atom N475 (1.83GHz)
- 1GB DDR3 RAM, 1 SODIMM Slot, 2GB Max; Intel GMA 3150 graphics
- 250GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM) + 500GB Free Web Storage; 0.3MP Webcam
- 10.1-Inch 1024X600 WSVGA Matte Finish LED Display; 802.11 b/g/n; Bluetooth 3.0; Chiclet Keyboard
- 6 cell battery for up to 13 Hours of Battery Life; Windows 7 Starter Operating System (32 bit)
Customer Reviews
barely passing - zojo -
just bought this red ASUS Eee 1015PED-PU17(-RD).
BLUF:
goods - so far unbeatable battery life, good size and light weight, blutooth ready
bads - horrible speaker (cannot overcome with earphone), awkward keyboard positions (prone to typos), poor at picking up weak wifi signals....
detail:
i bought it for travel purpose and not been happy carrying larger laptop (recently been using HP and macpro 15") due to carrying weight.
much happier about this little guys weight and size. i'm also nicely surprized about battery life. most of times reviews focus so much on technical aspects that combined use (heavy video playing>> web surf, and word processing) dont typically give practical info on "true" battery life. however i'm totally happy about battery life which i havent gone <50% battery life on typical 6 hours of heavy use.
i'm disappointed about audio problem. i read previous review about poor audio but i thought i could overcome by using earphone like my other laptops but i couldnt (even adjusting audio control to various recommended environment without a hope). just cant get loud enough. so bad enough for me to consider not buying ASUS again since i would have to carry an additional amplified speakers so that i can hear the media.
i would imagine keyboard issue is similar to using other netbooks - i'm keeping missing the shift key on right side and pushing arrow keys due to their proximity.
also i often work in areas with weak signals and often i would have hard time picking up signals when other laptops have lesser of an issue. since other netbook brands are not having similar problem (or lesser maybe), i think it's ASUS issue just like audio.
