After sev­eral months of con­tem­plat­ing on the idea of a school laptop, I finally caved in and made the pur­chase of an Asus Eee PC 1000. I’ve thrown the Win­dows 7 beta on there and it is abso­lutely fab­ulous to use.

The thing that I like most about the Win­dows 7 beta is that it actu­ally works. You can use it as an every­day oper­at­ing sys­tem almost flaw­lessly. All the hard­ware worked from out of the box, with the excep­tion of the Eth­er­net port and the web­cam. Just down­load the XP Eth­er­net driver from the Asus sup­port web­site (the web­cam is still some­thing I’m fig­ur­ing out). Per­haps I should note that installing Win­dows 7 on the 8GB SSD is not a good idea — stick just a few applic­a­tions on there and you’ll find you’ve got no space left.

Bat­tery life is about 5 hours from a full charge.

Con­sid­er­ing the size of this net­book, it is remark­ably easy to type on — even easier than most full-size laptops I’ve used. If you read the art­icles on the inter­net, though, there are com­plaints about the right shift key pos­i­tion. Now con­sid­er­ing that I didn’t think I even used the right shift key, let me tell it really is atro­cious as I keep hit­ting the up key instead — almost every time. Most of the other keys are well placed (although the Func­tion keys are a little to the left). The track­pad is also good.

The micro­phone is OK. Con­sid­er­ing that I’ll rarely be using it, it doesn’t really mat­ter. And because the micro­phone is below the screen, typ­ing is very loud.

Unfor­tu­nately, most other net­books are smal­ler and although they are sig­ni­fic­antly cheaper, I wouldn’t recom­mend get­ting one with a screen of less than 10 inches. You might think £280 is a lot for such a small machine but it’s the port­ab­il­ity, the bat­tery and the qual­ity you get — this thing looks abso­lutely stun­ning, the white ver­sion looks like a little Mac­book. When I’ve got the funds, I’ll be mod­ding it with a touch screen and a GPS dongle.

I should stress the import­ance of a Wind Surfer to help boost your Wifi sig­nal. Mine went from 2 bars to 4 bars and all it took was a few minutes of print­ing, cut­ting and sticking.