IN DEPTH: Official Eee PC with XP

APC Mag Australia has an in-depth review of the XP-based-Asus Eee PC -

The XP version is identical to the Xandros-based 701-4G model except that it has the standard XP Home Edition SP2 preloaded and comes with the XP Home OEM install disc and Asus’ XP drivers and a recovery utility DVD. It also costs USD80 more.

However included versions of Media Player, Live Messengers and other applets were not always the latest version. A special edition model that will have a trimmed down version of the XP, which will include MS Works, will be released soon.

XP Home takes up more than 2GB, compared to Xandros' 2.2GB. But the latter is also preloaded with tons of apps, making it instantaneously usable. With the XP install, you will need to load your apps, which will quickly gobble up the remaining SSD space. That is why Asus has thoughtfully included a 4G SD card in the deal.

Boot Time - XP clocked at 25 seconds, compared to Xandros' 20 seconds. But it goes into standby in 3 seconds, and awakens within 3 seconds as well. Xandros needs 10 seconds for each cycle.

The 7" screen runs at a max 800x600 and is obviously too small to be user-friendly. Above screen cap shows the Start menu disappearing off the top while also taking up half of the screen width. Hopefully Asus will come out with almost-XGA drivers to rectify the problem.




A utility lets you change the screen resolution on the fly in order to see more of the XP window using the 800x480 size, which rescales things so that they mostly fit on the screen. But expect to still do a lot of window dragging, especially to view the control buttons.

Performance: The 512MB RAM is sufficient to run mid-sized apps. But once you multi-task, things will slow down significantly. Thankfully, the Eee PC isn't the sort of device on which you would seriously multi-task. The Celeron chip is underclocked by default to 630MHz to help extend battery clock. You can use eeectl (from www.cpp.in/dev/eeectl) to push the clock speed back up, along with tweaking the FSB speed, fan control and even boosting screen brightness, all depending on which BIOS version the Eee PC is running.

While the XP-based 701 is good enough, a better XP fit will likely be the new 900 series, with its 9" 1024 x 600 LCD, 1 GB RAM, and Atom processor.