I loved my eeePC 700 with Xandros Linux– so portable, so easy, so cute –  but I had problems with re-installing the VPN client I need to access the work wireless.

I loved my husband’s eeePC 701 with Windows XP – no probs with VPN or viewing my work email via webmail (that only really works on Internet Explorer)….so I stole it for a few months…. but every time XP had an update I’d lose all available memory as it just bloated…and some applications demanded that I manually re-size the screen …driving me ‘nanas.

Two weeks ago I bought an eeePC 1000H. I really love it so far. It is a bit bigger physically than the eeePC 701, but with 80G of storage I can store my photos on it and make backups of presentations when I travel, and it works just fine with the cult of Microsoft that is my workplace. Apparently it runs Vista just fine. I can even run Second Life on it – slow but enough to do an emergency repair or talk to a friend.

It is actually faster to do most things than the eeePC 1000 which has a 16G SSD drive – contrary to what one would think. It is a *totally* different beastie to the eeePC 1000HD – which has a slower processor. Check out the eeePC specification comparison table in Wikipedia if you want to know more.

Image below :Eee PC 1000H and Eee PC 901 20G   Uploaded to Flickr on October 17, 2008 by Josh Bancroft

The deal clincher for me was the battery life – a claimed 6-7hrs when not using wireless. I do not get quite as good times as I paid $50 to a man in a small booth in Sim Lim square in Singapore to upgrade the RAM from 1G to 2G while I waited.

I have also enjoyed using bluetooth for the first time. I can download photos from my phone and save backup files from my work laptop with absoluter ease.

The only problem I had with it was that it seemed like the internal microphone was not working. The mike would not pick up my voice when I was recording a movie with the webcam. Many posts to forums talk about people sending their 1000H back to ASUS as broken, but it turns out that there is a simple fix.  Turns out there is a really odd manufacturer’s setting to do with making the mike  just record one zone To fix it, go to the Realtec HD Audio manager on the taskbar, Microphone tab, and disabled the Beam Forming and Echo Cancellation

Some folk have been really excited by the fact that you can install Mac OS X on it …but the bit of geekery that thrills me is the multi-touch touchpad.

Pootling about on the day I bought it, I found this article from Laptop Magazine July 2008 about how to upgrade the firmware so that the touchpad does magical things, Eee PC 1000H Updated with New Multi-Touch. Apparently ASUS had not officially approved this, so you needed to download the software here from Elantech, the Taiwanese manufacturer. The website *is* all in Chinese, but I somehow managed to do it. Check out this video below to see all the hoops it will jump through, Multi-Touch on the Eee PC 1000H.

I really love the way I can  put two fingers on the pad and they slowly pull them apart diagonally and it makes my screen zoom larger or smaller. I have set it so that if I pull down with three fingers, it does the same as tapping [alt] [tab] and then I slide my hand sideways sideways to select the window I want. The touchscreen seems to work best with google’s web browser Chrome – so this is my browser of  choice for *reading* now. For editing or publishing I still use Firefox, as Chrome is just flakey.

It is easily the best $535 I’ve spent in a very long time.