Asus Eee PC 1101HA Seashell Netbook Review

Pre-installed Software and Performance

The Eee 1101HA comes preloaded with Windows XP Home Edition. Asus is not offering a free upgrade to Windows 7 with this netbook, or a variant sporting it out of the box, however it is supported. You can find all the necessary drivers on the manufacturer's support website, that said we feel the included copy of XP is a better fit for the hardware.

Bundled with the 1101HA are a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, Norton Internet Security and Asus' Eee Storage software which gives you 10GB of online hard drive space. Fortunately the system is lean on bloatware. I only had to uninstall a few programs instead of over a dozen like we've seen from other manufacturers.

One interesting piece of software is the Super Hybrid Engine which allows you to manage different power modes from an easy to use graphical interface. We have seen similar applications on other portables before, but what sets Super Hybrid Engine apart from the pack is its ability to overclock the system.

In order to do this you must enter the BIOS and select the level of overclock you want, from 5% to 30%. Then in Windows you can enable the overclock on-the-fly by switching to Super Performance mode in Super Hybrid Engine. The result is an increase in clock speed of up to 410MHz. On the other end of the spectrum, you can underclock the system by 333MHz choosing Power Save Mode in order to conserve battery power.

Below are various benchmarks that were run both at the stock 1.33 GHz and the maximum overclock of 1.74 GHz. To give you an idea of how the Eee PC 1101HA stacks up against its rivals, we've included benchmark numbers for the similarly spec'd Acer Aspire One 751h and Acer's 8.9" model running a standard 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor.