Asus Eee PC 701

5owners with an opinion

60%of verdicts positive

2/2positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for portability and battery; criticized for display and performance.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it

I had an Eee PC 701. Pluses: the size was perfect . Minuses: everything else, from the CPU to the tiny drive to the tiny RAM to the keyboard to the trackpad was meh, at best. I'd love one with modern tech, long battery life, decent display quality, and long battery life. I don't care if it could only do text mode. That might even be ideal for my uses, which would primarily involve running Emacs and org-mode.

Likes it

I owned the eee 701 and it was fun using it in cafés. I graduated to the Acer 1410. Now I have a used Lenovo OG bought for $80 but its use case is similar to the netbook.

Likes it

It may be a 701, but I need to find which box it's in to actually check. It has a 7 inch screen, it's old but still holds charge in the battery for 2h at least, has a long charging cable, my only "mod" was to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, and it has a 4GB SSD I think - I have a card in it with 16GB and it runs a never updated version of crunchbang that was installed I really don't remember when - it doesn't go online ever, so it's fine. The last thing I did in it was to replay Illusion of Gaia using an emulator.

Doesn’t like it

I was those people. I bought the original eee 701 at launch. I ordered it online because local stores didn't stock them. Xandros sucked not because it ran linux, but just because it was some little-tikes toy OS. But Windows didn't even run correctly on the damn thing either, because the 480px vertical height of the screen wasn't tall enough to fit the minimum height of many windows. The device was basically a toy for nerds, no normal person would have picked up one of these devices and thought "this is a computer I can use for real things" People don't not use Linux because they've considered it and found out that their applications won't run on it. They don't use it because they've not considered it at all, because 99%+ of people do not choose the OS on their computer. They go to the electronics store and buy a Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, or Apple. There's no Asus Eee running Xandros at my local Best Buy, and if there ever was, it wasn't on the shelf for very long.

Likes it

I had both of those. I think I got the most use out of the 701. I took that thing everywhere and used it as my primary laptop. You can probably find pictures of me using it to give conference talks, sitting around at hackathons coding (with a HHKB attached), etc. I used Debian, and even had working WiFi. The 901 I bought later since it seemed like more specs would be better, it was big and cheap feeling. I do remember getting a WiMax stick for it and reading RSS feeds in Google Reader on my commute. That was so novel at the time!