Asus Eee PC 900

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Asus hasn’t made any changes to the Eee PC 900’s keyboard and how well you get on with its fun-size keys depends largely on your patience – and, obviously, the size of your fingers.

The keys are positive, with plenty of travel, but building up a reasonable touch-typing speed takes some practice – unless you’re a particularly prodigious child (with hands to scale), of course. Thankfully, there are no surprises with the keyboard layout, and there’s even a row of function keys complete with the usual dual-functions for certain laptop controls.

Asus has thankfully dumped the Eee PC 701’s titchy trackpad though, and the one on the Eee PC 900 is not only larger at 63 x 37mm, but also offers multi-finger control – much like that found on the Apple iPhone and MacBook Air.

Pinch two fingers together on the trackpad and the display zooms into an image or document; move them apart and it zooms out. Scrolling is achieved by dragging two fingers up and down the trackpad. Scrolling works well, but zooming takes some practice. It may be larger than on the 701, but the trackpad is still too small to move two fingers around with ease and we had to set the sensitivity to maximum on our review model to get it work to our satisfaction.

More memory is a good thing if you want to run Windows XP and the single 1Gb SODIMM sits in a user-accessible slot on the laptop’s underside. Storage comes courtesy of both an integrated 4Gb SSD and either an 8Gb or 16Gb flash drive slotted into the motherboard.

Which storage configuration you get depends on your choice of operating system. Both Linux and Windows XP Eee PC 900’s cost the same, but the Linux model has a 16Gb flash drive, Windows makes do with 8Gb (Asus has to cover the increased licensing costs somehow).

By default, the Linux model is configured with the SSD as the system drive, leaving around 1.3Gb free. A full installation of Windows XP SP2 on the SSD leaves around 2.6Gb free, but of course that leaves little room for other applications (though Windows can be pared down for Eee PC using nLite ) – not to mention a swap file and the 1Gb Windows hibernation file.

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