Asus Eee PC 1015P Netbook

[Midpoint]

As a bit of a change, I thought I'd review a netbook as it's a bit of equipment that I'm sure is useful for a number of astro tasks. In my case, I got it to capture video from my SPC900 web cam without needing a mains power supply and so a long battery life was my main requirement.

Spec:

Asus Eee PC 1015P - Amazon £249.99

CPU - 1.66Ghz Intel Atom N450

Memory - 1GB

HDD - 160GB (C: 80GB, D: 54GB, 20GB restore partition)

OS - Windows 7 Starter

Advertised battery life - 11 hours

Connections - 3xUSB, SD card slot, Ethernet, WI-FI

After contemplating purchasing this Netbook for a couple of months now, I finally decided to order it on Thursday and had it on my desk by Friday morning. Initial impression were good as it's a very neat looking little unit and doesn't have that cheap look that you get from some laptops (most notably, my other half's Dell ) but it does come with a lot of rubbish installed that most people will want to clear off before doing anything else.

Once set up, I installed SharpCap and the SPC 900 drivers so that I could see how long the battery would last for my intended use. I ran two tests, one capturing to the internal HDD and one capturing to a 32GB SD card. I created a special astro capture power profile to prevent it going to sleep or shutting down during long periods of inactivity and the screen and WI-FI network were turned off for the majority of the time the tests were run.

I have to say, I was very impressed with the results! I didn't manage 11 hours (which I thought was a bit optimistic anyway) but the battery seems to last long enough for my needs.

HDD Capture - 8:00 - 8:30 hours

SD Capture - 8:40 hours

At these times, I would run out of disc space before I ran out of power which is probably a good place to be in for the amateur imager.

Aside from capturing, I also gave Stellarium a go and found it was able to run between 20 and 30 frames a second which was perfectly adequate. You wouldn't want to use it for too long out in the field as it'll drain your battery much quicker, but it's handy if you need to make a quick check. If you intended to use this netbook for telescope control, you'd probably want to try something less CPU intensive, but I suspect it'll do a perfectly fine job of that too.

Other little bonuses are three USB ports, two on the right and side and one on the left so that I could choose which side to connect the camera to avoid awkward trailing wires. The track pad, although not as sensitive as I'd like, does support multi touch so I was able to configure it to work almost identically to my Mac which was a very pleasant surprise. Charging from empty to 100% only takes about two hours if you're not using it so it can be ready to go much quicker than my current laptop. The case was also very nicely styled as well and actually looks quite smart. Not the most important thing in the dark but I'd rather a nice case than an ugly one given the choice!

On the whole, I have been very pleased this netbook. I expected a something that might achieve half the advertised battery life in a cheap and nasty case but the Asus exceeded my expectations on both those counts. The only down sides worth mentioning is that amount of useless pre-installed software that takes quite a while to remove and the fact that there is a 20GB restore partition slap bang in the middle of the drive which is why there are two small user partitions rather than one big one (although, you can copy the restore partition to an external HDD and delete it from the internal HDD if you wanted).

If you're looking for a netbook for capturing images when out and about, then I can highly recommend a 1015 series netbook.

[Demon Barber]

Excellent report! Enjoyed to the point of wanting one,

Cheers

Mike

[Steep]

Asus make nice kit, I've still got one of their original Eee PC 701s Other tips for extending battery life are, turn screen brightness well down, turn the built in webcam off if you can along with bluetooth if it has it.

[Midpoint]

This particular model doesn't have bluetooth, but I did forget to mention the built in camera. Although it has an external on/off switch, this doesn't actually turn it off. It merely slides a cover over the lens. This means that it can still be activated by software even though it will only record a black screen. Handy if you want to take some darks with it I guess

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice report. Sounds an interesting bit of kit.

[anneparker]

I think this model is not good like the earlier one. because of no blue tooth, internal switch which can be damage if hit to something. The best thing is that the screen brightness and battery life is very good so could be consider for buying. Well, skin covers are coming for perfect size may be thought of taking now.

[Superewza]

Great netbooks, now get Linux on there stat!

Hope you don't feel the need to upgrade soon, what with Zacate just round the corner...