It was easy to set up. I took it out of the box, slotted the battery into place, plugged in the charger and left it to charge up. When I turned it on, Windows XP SP2 came up fairly quickly.
I had earlier acquired an EeePC 900, which turned out to be essentially useless because the keyboard was too small for touch typing. My fingers just kept hitting the wrong key, or a pair of keys. The EeePC 1000HE turned out to be totally different. You can see from the photo that the width of the keyboard is 10 inches. The EePC 900 is 8.25 inches. For comparison, my iMac desktop machine, which on which I typically type a few thousand words a day, is 11.25 inches for the main keyboard – it also has a block of arrow keys and the numeric keypad over to the right. 10 inches seems to be a good compromise.
The other good feature is the battery. It shows up as about 8 1/2 hours when charged. If you just close the lid, leaving it in suspended mode, it seems to lose about a hour a day. So it should not be necessary to cart about the charger:
The screen is fairly small 1024 x 600 pixels, or 8.7 inches x 5.1 inches, but it is quite good. I tried loading up the Mobipocket Reader and an ebook. I read for about an hour on the tube and it was fairly easy to read without strain, which surprised me. Normally I hate reading any books on an lcd screen – I am eagerly waiting for the epaper to become more widespread.
So my first impressions were fairly good. Next time I will move on to the operating system.
