Review: Asus Eee PC 1000HE

The Eee PC 1000HE from Asus is the latest addition to the firm's line-up of low-cost netbooks. With a 10in display, larger keyboard and larger battery than many earlier models, the new system should prove more attractive for those seeking a lightweight PC that can be used for longer periods while on the move.

Available now, the Eee PC 1000HE is one of the first mini laptops we've seen to use the new N280 version of Intel's Atom processor. It also features a high-density 8700mAh battery which Asus claims delivers "all day computing".

While the claims of manufacturers are almost always exaggerated, we found that the Eee PC 1000HE did run on battery power for much longer than other netbooks we've tested, and beat many larger systems as well. However, the battery pushes up the weight of the unit to about 1.45kg, while many rival netbooks weigh in at little more than 1kg.

Nevertheless, the Eee PC 1000HE is still smaller and lighter than most standard laptops and, with a decent screen and keyboard, it's worth considering by anyone needing a portable computer for basic office applications, email and web browsing.

Asus claims a whopping 9.5 hours of battery life for this model, but in our tests it lasted for four hours and 48 minutes, as measured by the Battery Eater Pro benchmark application. As usual, we tested with power management disabled, so users should see longer than this in typical use, depending on how much they use the wireless connections.

This represents a significant improvement over the two hours that is typical for a netbook, even if it does come at the cost of some extra weight.

The Eee PC 1000HE is similar in the rest of its specifications to a great many other netbooks. It has 1GB of memory, a 160GB hard drive and runs Microsoft's Windows XP Home Edition.

However, the processor in this case is the newer 1.66GHz N280 version of the Atom, rather than the 1.6GHz N270 used in most other designs. In practice, we found this produced very little difference in performance.

We tested the Eee PC 1000HE using Business Winstone 2004, a benchmark suite that measures performance while running actual office applications carrying out typical processes. The Asus returned a score of 13, which is in line with many other netbooks we've seen, including the Asus Eee PC S101.

This is not surprising because of the tiny difference in clock speeds between the processors in question, but also because the bottleneck for office applications is typically the hard drive.

While this means that the system is no speed demon, it is still perfectly adequate for running office applications and other everyday tasks.