Gav's World : Eee PC 901

My Eee PC 901 - [SOLD]

I'd had my Eee PC 4G (701) netbook for about a year when I decided that it was time to upgrade. I'd had my eye on this 901 beastie for some time and when I saw that the price was good at Amazon one day, I went ahead and hit the "Buy Now" button.

Unfortuntaely when the laptop arrived, it had two dead pixels. However, I was straight onto Amazon who imediatelly arranged for a replacement to be shipped, which arrived a few days later. Excellent service - also meant that I could still "play" with the faulty one until the replacement arrived instead of having to send it back first.

Obviously, being an upgrade on the 701, this is even more of a cracking wee laptop, with a bigger screen, higher resolution, better WiFi, bluetooth, and 20Gig of solid state storage (my 701 had that amount of storage too, but only after a lot of modifications).

Specifications, "Out of the box"

Dimensions: 225mm(W) x 175.5mm(D) x 22.7mm~ 39mm(H)
Weight: 1.1kg (2.43lbs)
Intel® Atom N270 Processor
1GB DDR2 RAM
20GB on board solid state storage
- 4GB primary drive
- 16GB user drive
1024 x 600 (WSVGA) LCD back-lit display
Wireless 802.11b/g/n
10/100 Ethernet
Bluetooth
1.3M pixel web cam
3 x USB 2.0
VGA connector
6 cell 6600mAh battery (* approx 7.2 hours)

This is how the two models compare against each other.

After my minor modifications, my model also has:

2GB DDR2 RAM

With this laptop, I've decided to go straight to *buntu. Before that however, there was a quick hack needed to the default Xandros installation.

I've tried many versions of Ubuntu over the years, but have recently switched over to Lubuntu since I think Unity is just pants and when I tried to re-install the Gnome stuff, all of the icons got messed up!

The boot and login times vary quite a bit between versions and chances are that I'm currently running with whatever is at the top of this list:

Flavour	Version	Name	Boot Time [1]	Login Time [2]
Lubuntu	11.10	Oneiric Ocelot	0:29	0:06
Ubuntu	11.04	Natty Narwhal	0:42	0:15
Ubuntu	10.10	Maverick Meercat	0:29	0:11
Ubuntu	10.04	Lucid Lynx	0:23	0:18
Ubuntu	9.10 (modified)	Karmic Koala	0:41	0:13
Ubuntu	9.04 (modified)	Jaunty Jackelope	0:28	0:17
Ubuntu	8.10 (modified)	Intrepid Ibex [3]	0:47	0:27

[1] Press power button to login screen, ready to accept username
(so includes the 10 seconds of BIOS delay).
[2] Press [Enter] (after password) to desktop displayed and all applets
(NetworkManager etc.) loaded, from a fresh boot.
[3] With Array.org kernel