Asus Eee PC 904

The time lag between reviews like this and the product being available is, it seems, increasing. I've been looking out for an acceptable cheap notebook for months and everytime I think I've found one there's an announcement that makes me hold off. I decided the original EEE pc 701 keyboard was too small. As of today it's just not not possible to buy an EEE pc with a decent keyboard NOW, TODAY. It's delay, delay, delay.I'll probably end up buying something else. But rubbishing the 904 is wrong. If it was available TODAY I would buy it. But it's not available, so I'll wait. While I'm waiting something better will be announced and I'll wait a bit longer. I'll get tired of it in the end, and as soon as I buy something a serious vendor will announce a better product with immediate availability.sigh

The 1000 isn't available either.So all this sneak preview stuff here is a complete waste of time. This site would be a lot more useful if it simply refused to review products that were not available. Please consider it. PC Magazine at one point had a policy of not reviewing products that were not generally available.

How the heck is there such a performance difference between the 900 and the 904 if they are both using the Celeron? Is it clocked higher in the 904? What I really don't get is how the 904's multi-app performance is better than single app, when the 900 absolutely dies in multi app, when they are both supposedly using the same single core celeron. Something's fishy with this review.

As mentioned in the review, the difference in performance is due to a) the use of a hard disk in the 904 (SSD in the 900) and b) the fact (which we didn't mention) that the Windows XP 900 has no swap file by default.

Reviewing products *after* they go on sale wouldn't really make for news, now would it? In any case, the Eee PC 1000 is [url=http://www.ebuyer.com/product/146027]available now[/url], the 904 will be on sale in a few weeks.