ASUS Eee PC 901 8.9-Inch Netbook (1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 12 GB Solid State Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) Pearl White

The true ram size on 12 GB solid state drive is 3 GB for drive C. The other 9 GB is on drive D which is much slower. Anything you want to run quickly, like windows has to be on drive C. This is not stated in the advertising for the product, it should be because this is very inportant. IF you accept this limitation the product is quite good.

Great product, good size, lots of features. Pioneer in the netbook field with a good track record. Only negative thing I have to say is the fact that they don't make a (major) point of letting you know that the solid state drive is actually 2 drives. Unfortunately, the small drive houses the giant operating system. XP, after online updates in just a short time, will use all the drive space and you will get low drive space warnings. Not maybe, you will. If you don't need the speed or power savings of the solid state drive, buy the standard hard drive unit. As I am usually operating where there is power, and speed isn't a real concern, I wish I had opted this over the neat technology of SSD and battery performance. Geek in me now says wait for larger SSD units that will be available in the future. Otherwise, a great system. Now, I have to figure out how to keep the operating system on a diet to make this thing usable past 5 weeks.

When I sent a link to this notebook to my wife, and told her I just bought one for her, she became a "little" excited.

She will be taking it on trips, and even at home, doesn't want or need a larger product. (She also has a desktop for home use.) She wants a more portable product to take from room to room as she uses it for study, or to send emails, and text messages, or SKYPE to relatives 10,000 miles away.

I read a number of reviews here, and went to http://forum.eeeuser.com/ and http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=40356
to help me "optimize" it for my wife.

I received the notebook on 12-30-08.

Happily, XP already had service pack 3. Some of the tips in the above forums seem to already have been adopted by the manufacturer in my recent model, but a few suggestions, like turning off paging, and not using system restore, changing the default location for temporary files, for example, were helpful. I have never (in three days) had a low memory message. Still have about 950 MB on my c: drive.

I install programs on the d: drive, which already had been done with some other pre-installed programs. I bought an 8 GB SDHC to load up with photographs. If I could do it over again, I probably would have got a 16 GB SDHC, but even my 8 GB is only half full (with 3+ years of photos on it), and my d: drive has about 6 GB left on it, so I can still install plenty of programs if needed, and just get another SDHC card in the future.

Although the keyboard is small, I can touch type on it OK. Some reviewers really did not like the "tap" feature on the pad, but I like it.

It found my wireless home network easily, and I can go anywhere in my house and the signal never goes below 4 bars.

The only problem I had was when I wanted to keep a program from loading on start-up, after I checked the option to not have it start, the "apply" and "OK" buttons were at the bottom of the window, out of sight. (Because of the small size of the monitor, the window would not be dragged up to where I could access those buttons.)

I eventually changed the resolution of the desktop, and was able to apply and OK, and then set the resolution back to the native setting of the screen.

I think it is a great product, easy to use, very portable, and the new battery lasts over 5+ hours.

The speakers seem to be a bit too little, or produce just a bit too little sound.

Over all, though it is just what I wanted to get for my wife, and I am a "little" disappointed that she, not I, will be using it.

Runs like wild with some of the programming languages, such as Mathematica and SAS and R.

ultra portable

I have pretty big fingers and you get used to the keyboard in like a week.

The mouse is kind of rough to press.

Its missing a lighted keyboard.

I have tried many of the sub notebooks and the EEE PC 901 is simply the best. It's perfect for surfing and retrieving email and lasts approximately 6 hours between charges which are fast. It has an SSD drive it's quiet and emits little heat. Better dependability over a hard drive. It's uses an Intel Atom processor which uses little energy and even has a built in camera.Spend another $25-$30 and add a 2GB Ram (easy to install)and take advantage of the SD slot for carrying your documents and many movies.

Don't get caught up in the S101 hype. Too many extra $$$ for what you get.