Quote:
Originally Posted by Boywonder
I'm using an Asus Eee PC 1005HA with Windows 7 and 250 GB hard drive. I also upgraded to 2 GB RAM. I use it mainly for email, surfing the net, and saving/uploading my pictures and videos when I travel. It's really portable and the battery is supposed to last 8+ hours but I've yet to use it that long. I love it and would recommend it.
I would recommend not using Internet Explorer as it was really slow. I'm running Google Chrome which is a lot faster and, in my opinion, a better browser anyways.
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Chrome may be faster at rendreing, but when opening a new tab freezes your system for nearly a minute (literally; even if the Start menu is responding you can't even launch Solitaire until the drive access light goes off), you don't have many options. IE seemed to be the eassiest on the pathetically slow 8GB Intel SSD that was never even meant to run XP (the XP models had a slightly faster Samsung SSD). Even so, I preferred Portable Firefox on a USB drive (kept my netbook's installation a bit cleaner), though I often used IE anyway (USB dongles are prone to being snapped off). Firefox was barely any better than Chrome when it came to drive access, but at least the portable version wasn't accessing my SSD, thus, not triggering the freezes every time something is written.
FlashFire, a utility that improves slow SSD performance by caching writes into system memory helped a lot. I could actually use Chrome and Firefox installed natively! The only problem was that Hulu and other Flash services more intensive than, say, YouTube, were noticably slower on Chrome and Firefox (more screen tearing for sure). This is likely Flash's fault. That said, my usage scenarios will change now that I have a real HDD installed.
Unfortunately, my system allows a maximum of 1.5GB RAM due to 512MB being soldered-in leaving only one expansion slot for a 1024MB module. I've been at the maximum 1.5GB since about 3 hours of pulling it out of the box.
Windows XP is light enough anyway that I've only needed the page file/virtual memory once and that was likely due to a memory leak or something (bunch of browser tabs open but nothing too intensive).