Mizzle

Here's the deal - I bought the Acer Aspire One netbook as I was getting quite tired of dragging the oh-so-heavy Dragon with me in school every day. Told myself I didn't need a laptop that was rich on features, but rather something that was light and portable, and I must say I've found the laptop in question!

Hardware and looks

I'll start off with the most noticeable thing; the looks. This thing is a case of 3x S - super sleek and sexy. I purchased the blue variant and my sister has the pink one, and we both think they look fantastic. The front is glossy, and I'm very surprised by how scratch resistant it actually is! I've had it for a few months now and carry it in my school bag every day along with the charger, and it has only got a few very small scratches.

The size of the AAO is excellent. It easily fits in most bags, etc., and it weighs about a kilogram. That's less than my camera for crying out loud!

Opening it up, you'll notice a keyboard that pretty much fills the bottom part from left to right. Yet again the AAO manages to impress me with a superb keyboard that I found excellent for typing on. I've tried an online speedtest on both the AAO and HP Dragon, and got a score of 106 words per minute on the HP, while the score was 102 words per minute on the AAO. Impressive, indeed.

The trackpad is also pretty cool, as it supports multitouch. It's not particularly useful as the size is pretty limiting, but heck, it's there! The left and right buttons are on the sides of the trackpad. This works a treat, and I've had many comments from friends on how great it actually is.

The screen looks very good for a laptop this small and cheap. It's at 1024 x 600 pixels, and it's glossy. I would have wished for more pixels in the height, but 600 just about does it. Colour reproduction is quite good, although its contrast levels are a bit high.

It's got two memory card readers, which is extremely useful for me as a freelance photographer. They seem to be high-speed. Other than that, it's got 3 USB 2.0 ports, VGA out, Ethernet port, 3.5 mm audio output and microphone jack, and of course the charging port.

Battery performace is quite good as well. The battery is a tiny 3-cell battery, and goes for about 2½ hours per charge. In my opinion, that's pretty good for a battery this tiny. The charger uses 30 watts, so it's good for the environment and electricity bill!

The fan is a bit annoying and can get a bit too much at times, but I've got an application installed that pretty much fixes that problem by only letting the fan run once the temperature is at 55 degrees celsius.

Software

My AAO came with Windows XP SP3 preloaded, but you can get it with Linux as well. It has a gigabyte of RAM (upgradeable to 1.5 GB), and either 160 GB HDD (Windows) or 16 GB SDD (Linux), I believe it is. Windows runs pretty smoothly on the netbook, and 1 GB of RAM seems more than sufficient for this OS. It eats up approx. 25% of the RAM memory on boot, so you'll have a fair amount of RAM left for apps.

As said, I use it in school, and have got Outlook, Word, MathCad, Photoshop, Live Messenger, Firefox and a few extra applications open at all time on it. It's just perfect for this kind of "light" use, and WLAN performance is excellent too. Unfortunately there's no Bluetooth support, but that doesn't get you on the Internet anyway, does it?

It boots up more than twice as fast as my HP machine, which has got a much more powerful CPU (1.6 GHz Intel Atom vs. 2.8 GHz Intel Core2 Extreme X9000) and four times the RAM (and well, runs Vista...).

Not sure what else I could add, other than I'm extremely satisfied with my purchase and can only recommend it to anyone looking for a tiny, yet powerful notebook. I'm pretty sure you'll love it as well I've attached some pictures of it, and will add more in another post in a second

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Mizzle

And here are the rest of the pictures - enjoy!

Oh btw, feel free to ask questions about the AAO if you have any. I'll be more than happy to answer them as thoroughly as I can

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Electronic Punk

Will have a read a bit later when I get some time

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Mizzle

You shall be more than welcome to do so

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Gigabot

Congrats on getting your new netbook Mizzle! Can you give Windows ReadyBoost a try on there and let us know how much of a difference that makes? We have a topic about ReadyBoost going on here at (http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php?t=96233). So it would be interesting to know your results with a netbook.

Edit: Nevermind it looks like you have Windows XP on there!

fitz

So.. can I have the dragon then?

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epk

nicee... hey, thanks for writing it for us =)

and cool pics!


ps. (and a little off topic) i'll be visiting denmark soon, we should hang out or something

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Mizzle

Gigabot,
Yeah, wouldn't like to run Vista on this thing...

fitz,
Sure - it's yours if you come and get it. By foot, naturally

epk,
No problem The pictures are far from up to standards, but they were done in no time with an external flash. didn't really have the time to make any more out of it.
Oh, I think that could be a problem with the whole meet-up and everything :P Denmark might not be that big, but there are still millions of people living there

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epk

oh, dont worry.. they look good
and
hah.. well, i didnt expect to bump into each other in the street
u live in or near cph btw?

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Gigabot

If you ever switch to Linux, I highly recommend you take a look at this site for tips and tricks:
http://jorge.ulver.no/2008/08/06/ace...ps-and-tricks/

Mizzle

I'm afraid not, epk.

@Gigabot
I won't :P

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Gigabot

Ok, here's a great site for Windows XP Acer Aspire One tips and tricks then:
http://aspireoneblog.com/

binoyxj

Mizzle it seems you have thoroughly studied the entire hardware.Good review.keep it up.Expecting more from you of this kind.

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epk

hehe its all cool

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perris

VERY nice revue, I didn't see the price

btw, I just picked up a couple of 350 gig wd usb powered hardrives for under a hundred bucks over at best buy, you're probably gonna need some extra capacity and these hardrives are the size of a small wallet

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Gigabot

I saw it on Amazon for $349.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-8-...9627364&sr=8-5

Mizzle

I guess I just said it was cheap. Well, its price varies though. You can get the cheap one for about $350 - 400, I guess, and the more expensive one for $550. In Denmark, that is

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Johnny

I want to get my daughter one of those. They do look nice.

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