Asus EeeTop PC ET2002 Review

The included wireless keyboard has a very slim design with chiclet style keys. Overall, it's comfortable to type on, though there were times where we missed having a numeric keypad and some of the added buttons that accompany a larger keyboard. This is personal preference, and for a machine that's meant to save space and features an all-in-one design, the included keyboard is right on the mark.

The laser mouse offers a separate on/off switch and a clickable scroll wheel. Both the mouse and the keyboard are easy to set up. Simply pop open the battery compartments, insert two AAA batteries for each peripheral (Asus includes 4 batteries to get you started), and press the connect buttons to link the mouse and keyboard to the Eee Top.


During our tests, applications loaded fairly quickly, though there were occasional delays while multitasking. These delays weren't unbearable by any means and should be expected from netbook-like hardware, so we won't complain.

To test the multimedia playback capabilities of the ET2002, we downloaded a few high definition clips from the Microsoft Windows Media HD Content Showcase. During our tests, both 720p and 1080p clips played smoothly. We also watched a handful of videos from YouTube (some with HQ/HD quality) without many complaints.


Until Adobe officially releases support for GPU acceleration with Flash, playback of streaming content will likely be met with mixed results and some videos may appear choppy. The good news is that Adobe has promised GPU acceleration (we've seen it live and it works great...) support for Flash 10.1, which is set to arrive before the end of this year. This should definitely improve streaming video performance since the Atom processor won't have to do all of the heavy lifting.

Although the ET2002 will ship with Windows Vista Home Premium, our contact at Asus recommended testing under Windows 7 since the machine will qualify for the free upgrade. As such, our test system was preloaded with Windows 7 Release Candidate. We performed the majority of our tests using Windows 7 RC, though we did roll back to Vista Home Premium using the machine's hidden recovery partition to get a better feel for some of the software that will ship with the ET2002.