Review: 1101HA-MU1X-BK ASUS Eee, Slightly bigger, slightly..

Overall Rating4.334.334.334.334.33

Slightly bigger, slightly slower than it’s Asus 1000 cousins - but still pretty cool

The Asus eee 1101 is Asus’s first foray into the “bridge” gap between 10″ netbooks and 12″ laptops, and has a fair number of strengths and a few weaknesses.

A few differences between this and the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-PU1X-BK 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - 10.5 Hour Battery Life:

* The 1101HA has a slightly slower processor (1.33 Ghz) versus 1.66 Ghz. You’re able to overclock it to make up for that performance loss, however.
* The LCD on the 1101HA is is 720p (1366×768), but anything running at 720p will most likely overtax the CPU and make it a poor viewing experience. Even playing Quicktime mp4 (720p) with a 5mbps bit rate had frame dropping.
* Awesome battery life. Laptop Magazine reported nearly 9 hours of battery life on their torture test but it hit 7.5 hours in my test of WiFi + movie playing.

The main competition is the Acer Aspire One AO751h-1893 11.6-Inch Black Netbook - 8 Hour Battery Life, which has a slightly smaller pricetag to match the slightly less battery runtime. But it also includes Vista, a bigger hard drive and more memory. So, on the dawn of Windows 7’s release date, having Vista would make the upgrade process to Windows 7 slightly easier. Even though I’ve had mixed experience with the Acer brand, it represents a better value than the 1101HA.

The problem that if you were to shop for a netbook today, you’re almost innundated with choices. There are too many to choose from, and there’s not one that stands out from the rest. The Asus 1101HA is an great netbook, but it doesn’t make the decision easier to choose between this and the Acer A0751h.

Update (9/6/2010): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen. I also found some auctions for this item here.

The featured review for this product, ASUS Eee PC 1101HA-MU1X-BK 11.6-Inch Black Netbook - 11 Hour Battery Life Personal Computers, was written by N. Hawkins.

Related posts:

  1. Review: 1005HA-MU17-BU ASUS Eee, Great Computer - Not happy..
  2. Review: 1005HA-PU17-BU ASUS Eee, Great Computer
  3. Review: 1008HA-PU17-WT ASUS Eee, Great little machine
  4. Review: 1005HA-MU17-WT ASUS Eee, Great Computer - Not happy..
  5. Review: 1008HA-MU17-BU ASUS Eee, Stop looking, you’ve found..

Reviews (3)

Miles Lane

January 5th, 2010 at 2:30 pm    


Overall Rating44444

Great netbook with terrible speakers and touchpad buttons
When my wife wanted suggestions about what new laptop to purchase, I suggested this netbook. I recommended it because it had an SVGA+ display (1366 x 768 pixels) and amazingly long battery life. The screen and battery have not disappointed us.

However, we have noticed three major difficiencies in this netbook.

First, the speakers are just terrible. There is no bass whatsoever, and the midrange is pretty nonexistent as well. Frankly, I cannot bear to listen to music played on this netbook. I have gone into the Realtek equalizer and cranked the bass and dropped the high-end frequencies. It still sounds awful.

Second, the touchpad buttons are a rocker, not separate buttons. This means that you must press on the outside edges of the rocker in order to click. Which means your thumb has to travel a long way to switch between right and left clicks. I find this a real hassle. I have to move my whole hand to switch between buttons. This is lousy from an ergonomic standpoint.

Third, I did not know when I recommended this netbook to my wife that the CPU is designed to only recognize up to 1GB of RAM! I had planned to add another 1GB in order to improve performance and multitasking ability.

I currently own a different ASUS netbook myself — a 1000HE ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10.1-Inch Black Netbook - 9.5 Hour Battery Life. I love it, except for its limited screen resolution (1024×600). Its speakers are vastly superior to those in the 1101HA. Music sounds great on the 1000HE. Also, the Atom N280 CPU in the 1000HE sees the 2GB of RAM I put in the machine.

I have one last complaint that applies to both the 1000HE and the 1101HA. It is that both these netbooks have wireless cards built in that only support the 2.4 GHz ISM band. This band is also used by microwave ovens, cordless phones and bluetooth. This means that the range and speed of the wireless connection is often degraded by interference. Newer 802.11n cards support the 5 GHz ISM band. Some cards even support combining the bandwidth in both the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. I am planning to have my next laptop/netbook support the 5 GHz band.

Aside from these complaints, both the ASUS 1000HE and 1101HA are great netbooks!

I hope this helps you select the best purchase for you.


Martin Stadtler

January 19th, 2010 at 12:26 pm    


Overall Rating55555

Sweet Netbook
If you are looking for a Netbook with a great screen, unbelievable battery life, solid build quality, I highly recommend the 1101HA from ASUS. I have been using mine for a little over a month, and am so far very satisfied. I use this both to just surf the web when I am kicked back on the coach, and when I travel as my primary system. I travel very frequently, gone are the days when I have to run around the airport trying to find an outlet. I can put in a solid 8 hour day and just ‘forget’ to plug the system in for power. It doesn’t compare to my x301 thinkpad, but that is a $2K different class of system (this is a netbook, not a notebook). The 1101HA has an overdrive feature, that coupled with the built in Atom extensions for HD really boost performance when you want to watch movies, or have an intensive application (editing a large presentation).

If you are deployed this is a great choice, I would have been really happy to have had this the last time I was in the desert. It comes with a padded pouch, just throw it in your ruck and forget about it. Small enough to carry around, big enough to use.

Pros:
1. The screen is 11.6″, not the standard run of the mill 10″. More importantly it has a higher resolution than most netbooks out there at 1366 x 768.
2. Nice keyboard size for a netbook, feels well made, and allows me to type at speed.
3. Button to turn off the build in mouse-pad if your using a bluetooth (or any) mouse.
4. Bluetooth, definitely a positive, I have paired this to my earpiece to use with my softphone (or skype etc).
5. Great battery life.
6. Really nice build quality, looks great.

Cons:
Not much really, I never write reviews, it has to really be just that good to motivate me. The fingerprints left on the gloss finish don’t bother me, especially since ASUS provided a special cloth designed for that. The only real grip I have is that there is not external access to the hard drive, if you want to put an SSD in this system, you have to crack this sucker open (not for the faint of heart).
If you are going to upgrade the memory to 2GB, you need to purchase specific versions or it will disable the over-clocking feature. The ASUS support sit lists the memory modules that are know to work.

Linux: If you don’t use Linux, that’s it, if you do read on..

I use Fedora, assuming that other distros will have similar results. Installed Fedora 11, you will need to add the plousbo yum repo for the GMA500 that Will Adam from Red Hat is driving. I bought the Fluendo codecs, they have a specific version to support the Atom that takes advantage of the hardware decoders. To manipulate the over-clocking feature you simply echo values to /proc, google it ;-). Outside of that, it just worked, webcam, bluetooth, etc.


N. Hawkins

February 6th, 2010 at 1:50 pm    


Overall Rating44444

Slightly bigger, slightly slower than it’s Asus 1000 cousins - but still pretty cool
Rated 4 stars.


Leave a reply

Overall Rating

Name *

Mail *

Website