After about 8 months, I felt that it was time to part with my Eee PC 1000HA Netbook, especially after I had gotten to actually touch (and lift) an Acer Timeline Laptop.

I had originally bought the Eee for its being small and light and the 6 hours of (new) battery runtime. The latter had naturally gotten lesser over the past few months and there were also times when the Atom CPU just didn’t cut it. Now that the CULV class of thin-and-light laptops is out on the market, I felt that this was what I had actually been looking for in the first place.

The specs of the new machine excel in several places: CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400), hard drive (Intel X25-M), RAM (4GB DDR3) are all performance relevant parts of the package that the Eee is no match for. Thanks to the hard drive being an Intel SSD (hdparm -tT says we’re reading at 160MB/s), I can now boot Linux entirely in the same time that my X58 Core i7 machine needs to get through all if its BIOS initialization screens (ugh!), which is about 10-12 seconds. Incredible. The CPU is a joy (compared with the Atom) I like having a digital display output (HDMI) and I got an actual 6 hours of work out of the thingie when I tried.

What’s the catch You ask? The model with the Intel SSD I bought (AS3810T-6775) appears to have disappeared from the market. And the keyboard and touchpad do not get a recommendation, especially the former definitely reminds me of the low price ($799) of the laptop as it feels like a toy.