4. The Atom Advantage: Performance

The Eee PC 1000 has Intel’s new Atom processor, which has a faster clock speed than Celeron used in early models (1.6 GHz rather than 900 MHz) and the PCMark and Sandra benchmark results are certainly better. However you may not see an improvement in all situations. The emphasis with Atom is on lower power and longer battery life; it has a single core with HyperThreading, a longer instruction pipeline, and doesn’t support out of order execution. This means general applications will run well, but floating-point-intensive tasks like image editing effects may be slower than you’d expect at this clock speed.

The Eee PC 1000 is sleeker than earlier models, but it also noticeably larger.

At full speed, the Eee PC 1000 can play streaming video full screen even when you’re running other applications, without jumping, stuttering or artifacts. Slow down the processor to save power and load up demanding applications, though—like an image editor with multiple photos—and the video starts to stutter and exhibit some artifacts. Loading a Flash-intensive site like Disney with a lot of images open in the background is slow, and rendering effects on a photo with a video playing at the same time is extremely slow.

You won’t have any complaints about performance if you’re using office applications, browsing the Web, making Skype calls or listening to music. You can also run one demanding application at a time without seeing any slowdown, but performance does suffer if you ask the Eee PC to run too many of them together. This is slightly more of an issue than on smaller, cheaper mini-notebook models, because the larger screen and bigger keyboard mean you’re likely to want to do more on the Eee PC 1000 than you would with less screen real estate.

The 660 mAh battery is larger and heavier than the 3-cell batteries Asus has used before, but the extra battery life is very welcome.

Where the Atom excels without any caveats is battery life. The hafnium in the processor leaks fewer electrons, making it more energy efficient, and the highest speed uses only 2.5 Watts. That means that even with the largest screen of any Eee PC model, you get real world battery life of five to six hours with Wi-Fi on and a mix of applications running, including watching half an hour of streaming video. We measured that time with the screen set to half brightness and the processor speed set to Auto. With Wi-Fi turned off, you can expect another 30 to 60 minutes of battery life, which means the seven hours Asus quotes for Windows isn‘t unrealistic.

With the processor set to super performance, Wi-Fi on and the screen set at full brightness, we measured three hours of battery life which included streaming two CDs’ worth of audio tracks and watching an hour of streaming video, as well as Web browsing. Playing DVD from an external drive, we ran out of battery after three and a half hours - long enough for two movies and most of a cross-country flight. Asus includes a copy of InterVideo WinDVD, so you get the codecs you need, even though the machine doesn’t come with a DVD drive.