But despite not getting the fanfare it deserves, the EEEPC 900HA is probably the best netbook on the market in terms of price, features, and quality.

There are a few important things one should consider when purchasing a netbook that weigh out any other considerations, and I’ll start with those.

First of all, size.

The 900HA is one of the tiniest netbooks around, and in a form factor that makes it very easy to stow away wherever you need it. No other netbook feels quite so comfortable fitting into backpacks, saddlebags, and canvas strap bags alike. At just around two pounds, there’s no excuse to not bring it with you everywhere you go.

Second, battery life.

While the 900HA features a 6-cell battery, it has consistently delivered for me around 4 hours of use, even with WiFi enabled. This makes a full day of classes’ computing very manageable, without lugging around the AC cable (which is, however, small enough to do if need be). Unfortunately, ASUS gave the 900A and 900HA different batteries than their earlier 900 brethren, so you’ll have a hard time finding a compatible secondary battery. This is something to keep in mind if you intend on immediately upgrading the battery. However, considering the popularity of the 900A model, as well as the 900HA, it’s likely many third party batteries have been released by the time you read this.

Third, power.

The 900HA, as the “A” suggests, comes with the wonderful atom processor. The atom will run most any programs you’d need a netbook for easily. The power of the EEE PC is just above what is perfect for a netbook; the processor is not the bottleneck of this system, rather, the small size of the screen and keyboard make actions like film editing and computer graphics, that would require a faster processor, untenable. This is just what you want: a 9″ screen that is able to do anything you’d want to do on a 9″ screen. It can even run high-definition video with little to no lag.

Many users immediately pop open the 900HA and throw in a 2GB stick of RAM, and with 2GB modules easily found for less than a Jackson these days, it’s hard to argue against. However, most users will find the 1GB of RAM sufficient for daily computing in XP. Some users who utilize the hibernate feature may even find it more convenient to use just 1GB of RAM rather than 2GB (as when hibernating, the computer will only have to write 1GB of information to the hard drive, which is a much faster thing to do than 2GB). Before you tack on twenty dollars to the price tag thinking you’ll upgrade the RAM, I suggest trying it out with 1GB and seeing how it works for you.

Of course, the RAM is extremely easy to replace, one of the other little features of the 900HA that when all put together make the product really stand out as a whole above the competition.

The 2.5″ Hard Drive is just as easily replaced as the RAM. The “H” part of the 900HA is the final point that puts the 900HA above the competition. The 2.5″ drive bay is completely compatible with the new extremely fast SLC SSD drives coming out over the next year. These drives will quite noticeably boost the speed of your laptop, and they are going down in price and going up in capacity and speed at a very fast rate. When you consider the SSD-based computers that most netbook companies offer, you see very poorly designed MLC drives with absolutely terrible r/w speeds. In very little time, these computers become unbearable to put up with, and the limited space makes any real computing extremely inconvenient. But the 2.5″ drive promises the 900HA will be usable for a very very long time.

And if you need ultra-portability for every ounce, the hard drive can be completely removed. I have done this, and booted an OS from an SDHC flash card. It makes the 900HA the lightest netbook available.

A few other things that should be mentioned:

The atheros WiFi chips in the 900HA are excellent, pick up WiFi better than most laptops I have tested, and are highly compatible with anything you’d like to do with it. Being able to run network administration tools without hacking open the netbook and replacing the WiFi chip is great. Little things like this that you don’t get from reading a spec sheet just add up to make an all around quality product.

There are all sorts of little things that make the 900HA excel over other netbooks. Perhaps the most fundamental of them, however, that puts it over the 900A, is the 2.5″ hard drive bay. Some might think that a disk-based drive is a detriment to the system. They are absolute wrong. Considering it can be replaced by a 2.5″ SSD drive, easily upgraded to 7200RPM or larger size drives, or removed altogether if you really want, the 2.5″ drive is the best thing for anyone. Putting terrible quality, tiny MLC SSD drives in the other EEE models is the biggest mistake in netbook computer design, and really more of a fad than a wise decision at all. If you like the sound of SSD drives, which you should, you need to understand the MLC drives included in most netbooks are NOT the SSD drives everyone is raving about. The only way to get a proper SLC SSD drive netbook, is by going with the 900HA and upgrading the 2.5″ drive.

Pros:

Fast
Light
Quality build and design
Great battery life for a 6-cell
Upgradeable to SLC SSD (real SSD drives!)
Very easy RAM upgrade
Very good WiFi chips included

Cons:

- Glossy back unnecessary, matte would be better.
- Low quality webcam
- No bluetooth built in
- No wireless N
- Power pack “buzzes” at just the right frequency, completely unnoticeable if you keep it off your desk, though.