My Aspire One is about a year old now and still working perfectly. However, due to various reasons I felt it was time to upgrade and ordered an Asus EEE 1101HA.

I’ve been eyeing the Aspire One D751H for a while – one of a few new 11.6″ netbooks with 1366×768 resolution. While the 8.9″ screen on the Aspire One is physically big enough, 1024×600 is a somewhat annoying resolution to work with at times. On top of that, the 6 cell battery is starting to lose its capacity being down to 4-5 horus, which means I have to carry a 3 cell as backup. Since a new 6 cell battery is expensive, I’d rather put that money and the selling price of the AAO towards a new netbook that comes with a 6 cell already.

In the process of researching the D751H however, I decided to look for other new netbooks and ran across the EEE 1101HA. I immediately fell in love. It too is a 11.6″ 1366×768 netbook with the same Atom Z520 CPU and easily upgradable RAM as the D751H, but has several aces up it’s sleeve.

First off, it has built in Bluetooth. While not a very big selling point, it certainly is nice since I use a Bluetooth mouse and can then free up a USB port by having it built in. Secondly, the 1101HA has a different construction than the D751H where the PC is made a bit thicker to fit the 6 cell battery in the case itself – not sticking out the butt like a hemorrhoid like on the D751H (and the AAO I have now). This is a really nice feature for me since I hate the look of the hemorrhoid-battery and more importantly it blocks the screen from being able to open all the way, which while not important for most people is important to me since I use it to read magazines holding the netbook horizontally.

The biggest feature of the 1101HA however is the battery life – Asus have something they call “Super Hybrid Engine” which is a fancy way of saving it has awesome power management systems. The battery life of the included battery is rated at 9.5 hours, with a 11.5 hour battery being available as an extra. While the rated battery life is always overrated, tests have shown it to provide over 8 hours of battery life for tasks like surfing and playing video constantly.

The 1101HA also has a “legal” (doesn’t void warranty) over-clocking feature where you press FN + Space to overclock the CPU from 1.33Ghz to 1.73Ghz, which in tests have shown it to be faster than the natively 1.6GHz Atom N270 and 1.66Ghz Atom N280. This however is lost if you upgrade to 2GB of RAM (unless you buy special RAM), which I plan on doing. I don’t need the over-clocked CPU anyways since it will drain the battery much faster, and I’d rather have the 2GB of RAM which might actually improve battery life due to it requiring a smaller swap file with Windows 7.

Lastly, the 1101HA like the D751H uses a GMA500 integrated graphics chip, which is actually more powerful than the GMA950 used on older netbooks. It supports 1080P hardware decoding, meaning it can play back full HD video. While I won’t be using that high a resolution for video, it also means 720P video is no problem at all – and I’ll definitely be wanting to get some 720P content for the 1101HA – the screen is 720P after all.

The new netbook will hopefully be here Wednesday, at which point the AAO will be put up for sale to cover some of the costs. Include what I would have had to pay for a new battery, and the upgrade should cost me $100-150 – totally worth it. I plan on partitioning the HDD with 30GB for the XP partition, 50GB for a Windows 7 partition and the rest (80GB) for a partition to store files (documents, media etc) on. That should give me a very nice netbook with Windows 7, 8 hours of actual battery life, 2GB RAM and a HD screen. The keyboard size will also be a nice upgrade, especially with my Bachelor’s thesis in the spring which will no doubt require a lot of typing away from home.

Check out this video to see the 1101HA in action: