EEE PC 1000HE vs 1000HD: What you get for $400 more in a recession

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 16:02

Opinion and Analysis

In other words, if you have the computer in a state where you can barely read the monitor, you're not online (this is a netbook I thought) and you can't do anything useful, you may get 9.5 hours of battery life.

In actual fact, when I charged the battery up full and checked after booting up, going online and then disconnecting the power, the battery monitor informed me that under present conditions, the battery had 6 hours 45 minutes of charge left. Three hours later, after leaving the 1000HE running doing little more than having a couple of browser windows open, it's down to 3 hours and 50% remaining.

My feeling is that if you doing some real work on the 1000HE while on the road, you might get about 5 hours out of a charge. I'm not sure what watching movies stored on your hard disk while on plane would do to the battery storage but I suspect about two movies might be the limit.

That said, the storage of the 1000HE is way beyond what the 1000HD provides. My machine's battery tells me it's full when I have a nominal 3.5 hours of life off mains power. In reality, I'm lucky if I can get two hours of doing real work using just the battery. If I could get a guaranteed four or five hours from my battery pack, I would be stoked (do they still say that?).

So in essence, the 1000HE is a lovely netbook - significantly better than the 1000HD in many respects. Is it worth the extra AUD$400 that it costs?

Better keyboard, better display, bigger hard drive, much better battery life and potentially more powerful processor. If those things are important to you, then the answer is probably yes.

However, we are going through a pretty bad economic downturn, so I'm happy to hold on to my 1000HD for as long as it lasts - and that may well be the case for many others.