Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 1 on an Asus eee 1215B

I purchased an Asus eee 1215B netbook recently with the intent of replacing my IBM T61 for day to day mobile computing. The computer, from the factory comes with a dual core 1Ghz AMD Fusion C-50 APU. It's also equipped with 1GB of DDR3 RAM and a 250GB HDD. I was able to get the laptop for a very reasonable price so I was able to treat it to a 4GB kit of DDR3 and a 60GB OCZ Agility3 SSD. For an operating system I chose Ubuntu 11.04 (before you say I made a typo, keep reading). My first impression with this combination of hardware and software was impressive. I had believed that the 1Ghz processor would hamper performance and that the integrated graphics chip would cause Unity to be sluggish. I was happy to find that I was very wrong. The performance of this little computer couldn't really be any better. You do notice a little lag here and there, but overall, it's very usable. I did find one small annoyance, however. The Radeon drivers included with Ubuntu 11.04 have a bug that prevents the laptop from resuming from suspend successfully. After a bit of digging on the Ubuntu forums, I discovered I was (thankfully) not the only person experiencing this issue and that some had had success upgrading to 11.10 Beta 1. I gave it a shot and got off to a bit of rough start. I had tried installing the proprietary (full 3D acceleration support) Radeon drivers and noticed visual artifacts after resuming from suspend. After removing the proprietary drivers the video never returned to normal so I re-installed. After I re-installed, I avoided installing the proprietary drivers (the default open source ones seem to work just fine) and worked, and is currently working, just fine.

I've been using the laptop for about a week now and I'm very very happy with it's performance. It boots up in just a few seconds and the battery lasts for about 8 hours. I replaced the hard drive with the SSD to increase the battery life and it appears to have had the desired affect as several reviews about the laptop claimed the battery lasted only about 6 hours. There is a little bit of graphical lag from time to time while under heavy processor load, but this was expected given the low end processor. Firefox, however, as well as some of the other commonly used applications open just moments after clicking them open and are just as snappy as my desktop once open.

One of my only complaints about this laptop is that you have to take the whole machine apart and void your warranty to replace the hard drive. Doing this is not particularly difficult but there are several tabs around the edges of the plastic pieces which break very easily while disassembly. I've noticed that the corners of the laptop do not sit flush any more since replacing the hard drive, now, due to some broken plastic clips. I believe Asus could have done a better job of taking a queue from other IBM's T series laptops and skip the clips all together (or just make the laptop more easily removed). Another small annoyance is that the keyboard is held secure underneath by small strips of adhesive padding. once you remove the keyboard once, however, it never quite sticks right anymore and gives the keyboard a slightly loose, almost cheap, feel. This was just yet another disappointment about the build quality of the machine.

All told the laptop is reasonable. While the build quality leaves a bit more to desire. The fact that it came with a price tag of just around $250 ($400 with all upgrades) and was able to replace my T61 for every day mobile computing. It's good for the price and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a highly mobile computer. If you need a smaller footprint Asus also offers a 10" model as well.