Some thoughts on my new netbook(Aues Eee PC 1000HE)

Earlier I preformed an impromptu battery life test. I started at 8:30pm with a fully charged six cell battery. At 1:27am my netbook went into standby mode with 5% battery charge or 17 minutes left. So about 5 hours. Now this was with wifi turned on and Utorrent running, so I could probably get the seven hours the sticker on the netbook promised.

The keyboard is comfortable to use. The only real complaints I have with it are the small right shift key and small arrow keys jammed into the corner. I find myself hitting the enter key instead of the shift key because of it's size. Yes the left shift key is closer to normal size and I know you're supposed to use the shift key opppsite the letter you want to capatalize but I only use the right shift key. This is just a weird typing quirk I picked up years ago.

Before I started using laptops on a regular basis I didn't like touch pads. I have learnt to use them. Having said that I like the touch pad on this netbook. Besides tracking finger movements very well it has some interesting multi touch features. Two fingers moved up or down will scroll the current page. There is also a zoom feature that allows zooming by dragging two fingers apart. I've had less than stellar results from trying to zoom but the scroll feature works wonderfully.

I've had a bit of trouble with sound. Some apps were hard to hear while others seemed fine. I managed a fix by raising all the sliders in the Realtek equalizer. It's not an elegant solution but it works.