Past wednesday, a new Saturn electronics store opened it's doors right next to the railway station of Brugge (Bruges). To celebrate this, they had several real bargain deals, among which an Asus Eee PC 900 to be had for 129 EUR.
Thing is, the advert wasn't really clear which Eee 900 type it was, and it was contradictory even: the netbook was said to be equipped with the Atom N270, and at the same time the CPU clock speed supposedly was 900 MHz. The latter being the speed of the earlier models that had a Celeron Mobile CPU.
So I called the store and asked for some explanation. The person on the other end of the line, a guy named Kevin, confirmed that it had indeed the Atom N270, yet at the same time ran at 900 MHz and not the usual 1600 MHz. Errrr ?
Well, this is a bargain deal, so that's why it's running at a slower speed. Sure, I know the N270 normally runs at 1600 MHz, only this netbook doesn't.
Yeah right.
I was offered to have one netbook be put aside for me, because they were supposedly running nearly out of stock.
Since you simply cannot find
any netbook over here for under nearly twice it's price, I still considered it a good deal. Even if would be the old Celeron model.
I was slightly tempted to ask if it would be possible to have one with Linux rather than the Windows XP version they offered, but as the answer was clear from the outset I refrained to do so.
So after work I drove to the shop, picked it up, and returned home. As thursday evening is swimming evening, I only had time to briefly power it into the bios when I returned home. There I saw confirmed what I suspected, it was a Celeron Eee 900 and not a revision with the Atom.
Saturn really should learn to educate their support staff better.
Still, I'm not unhappy that I bought the netbook it should provide sufficient speed for most things I have in mind to use it for.
Now all I have to do is put a modern OS on it.