After what may have seemed like some internal musings yesterday, and some opportune discounts, and a forgotten gift voucher from last Christmas, I picked up the Asus Eee PC 1000H today. The original price on the Eee box reads AU$ 647.00, and I ended up coughing up AU$ 520.00 [US$ 404.00] for the unit. Of course I went for the black unit, I just couldn’t see myself with a white computer, looking like a Mac wannabe.  I haven’t even booted it up yet, I’ve just unboxed it, and stuck it on the charger, I’m prepared to wait… for a wee bit, but all the lookyloos you like are after the link…

Packaging wise, there is no real oooh factor when you open the box, you can sort of see the Eee, through its protective packaging, but I didn’t get a flush of excitement, even considering all of the display models I could find seemed to be white. I’d actually never had a close look at the Eee in black. So when I lift it out of the box with it’s protective enclosure, I proceed to delve deeper into the box rather than freeing it from its bondage for the moment.

Directly beneath the Eee you find the included neoprene sleeve, which is a great inclusion, cause, well I’ll et to that later. Anything that saves a bit of cash outlay though is welcome at this point, especially since I’m going to have to fork out for an Antivirus suite. Hopefully I can get around that with shareware, but that’ll be for a later post.

Lift out the sleeve, and we get to the usual selection of battery, charger, and various documentation and software CD’s.

So you can see the charger and cable, manual, battery on top, software CD, warranty booklet, software certificate for Microsoft works which comes pre installed and at bottom left, probably what will become the most used item in the box, a microfiber cloth to keep the Eee clean. You’ll see Why in a minute. So here it comes …

Who can guess why I think that cleaning cloth will  be a favourite utility item, not a hard one. The Eee has a beautiful gloss black finish, in that photo there, [above] I have just taken it out of the protective plastic bag. Literally, I have touched it twice, and you can see that. The photo seems to highlight the fingerprints, they weren’t so evident to in plain sight. I definitely am going to have to get some sort of protector though.

On the right side of the Eee, there’s the SD/MMC card reader, two USB 2.0 ports, VGA out and the AC in ports.

On the left, Kensington lock port, Ethernet port, another USB port, microphone and headphone jacks. All pretty standard stuff, and what you’d expect from a net book at the moment. I suppose what took me to the Eee was the build quality, when I was looking around for the best prices on Friday, I luckily came upon a store with the 1000H and the Wind sitting side by side, and the guys in the store were quite happy to let me hands on with both at the same time. Geek radar really works

For me the overriding factor was the keyboard, you can probably see from some of the earlier photos that I don’t really have big hands, and I have to admit that I can touch type faster on a more compact keyboard, than my everyday laptop.

Another thing that sold me was the build quality, the Acer Aspire One, MSI Wind both felt like toys compared to the Eee. For a bit more [read lot] money the HP Mini would be my next preference, or the Lenovo S10, if I won the lottery. Attention to detail is what I like…

I was going to title this, “Peter’s a Tool, and he doesn’t have to buy what DGoldring Buy’s”, but I thought better of it, hopefully in the future we can offer some comparisons that will help you guys get your Netbook on. Now if that darned charging light would go green I will play with the bloody thing! Oh and I am reading the manual, if that charging light would go solid orange!

Charging, Charging, Charging, Charging, Charging, Charging, Charging, Charging, Charging,

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