June 3, 2008

ASUS Eee 700 or 900

Which Eee to Buy - ASUS Eee 700 or 900

I can guarantee which one you'll likely want, but the bottom line (price) may have the final say. You can save money by buying the Eee 700, but then you will not have all the add-on extras included on the 900. Look at them both and you'll see the difference is in the add-ons and features.

The outside of both the ASUS Eee 700 and 900 models is the same size. However the screen on the 700 is only a 7 inch compared to the 900 screen which is 8.9 inch. You should remember that the size of a computer screen is measured diagonally, and so there is an enormous difference in viewing area between the 700 and 900. As a result of the difference in viewing area, for the same program you are looking at there is less scrolling and screen positioning required to see just what you want.

The webcam is a 1.3 mega pixel standard on the 900. The 700 series has no webcam on the Surf models and a 0.3 mega pixel on the non-Surf.

The maximum size of solid state hard drive on the Asus Eee 700 series is 8GB, but that is increased to 12GB or 20GB on the newer Eee 900. On the 900 models, they both have 1GB of RAM. But the Eee 700's have 512MB of RAM, except the top-of-the-range 8G which has the 1GB of RAM. This may not sound an enormous amount of RAM if you are used to 2GB or 4GB of RAM in your current machine, but double the RAM will affect the speed that the computer responds.

We can argue that the webcam needs more RAM to be used effectively, but that is not the whole story.

ASUS has tried making a minimalist PC and have found that they cannot make it go fast enough without enlarging the hard disk. There is only one thing that really tests a computer and that is to put it into the hands of real users who have paid for the machine and let them use it. ASUS have said that they will be trying later to make use of the latest Atom processor from Intel, but until that is available the same processor is being used in both the 700 and 900 models. Try out the 700's and see if I am right that it does not have enough RAM or hard disc space.

The basic 700 model starts at $445.97 on Amazon's US web site (this is a 700 Surf 2G). It has no web cam and very little disc space at all. The top of the range 8G is priced at $599.99. These are for the Linux operating system. You can then change the operating system to Windows XP. The 900 models are the same price $549 and they have 20GB solid state drive on the Linux machine and a 12 GB on the Windows XP version. The difference in disc space covers ASUS for the cost of the licence that Microsoft charges for the Windows XP Operating system.

To my mind, to be able to use Windows XP effectively you will probably need to have more than 12GB of disc space. It would probably be better for the Windows XP machine to have the 20GB and increase the price, but you must make your mind up and buy what you are happiest with. The vast majority of people who read this article would probably say "I will go with the Windows that I know". I challenge you to go into a store and try out the Linux machine for half and hour and see what is better.