Acer Aspire One

Recently my IBM R50e Laptop had water spilt on during the night, whilst charging. The water damage took out the motherboard and the internal power connector, but most of the other components survived. So, after trying an eBay sourced motherboard (which didn't work), we put all of the working components up for auction. The good news is that a laptop broken down into individual parts sells for far more than a complete working version. However, there's a lot more postage and packaging involved in separating it all.

As work have supplied me with a Sony VAIO for use outside work hours, my R50e had been used by Anneka over the past year - so it made sense to source a replacement that she'd make use of. The only requirement was that it should be pink, if at all possible.

Netbooks have become extremely popular recently, which some believe to be partly due to the current economic crisis. The Intel Atom based Netbooks are a great alternative to a bulky laptop and are ideally suited to internet browsing and word processing tasks. So we opted for an Acer Aspire One (AOA110 BP), which includes:

Windows XP Home Edition
Intel Atom N270
1GB DDR2 RAM
16GB NAND Flash Module
Pink!

It arrived today and Anneka signed for it and started it up. Once I returned home from work, I set about optimising it and generally seeing what it could/couldn't do.

The first disappointment, but something we can easily live with - is the fact that it only includes XP Home Edition. There are several features of Professional that I find essential in daily use - such as the ability to join an Active Directory domain. However, this is quite literally the only disappointment, as any other negative points were soon resolved with a little bit of time spent getting used to it.

The Aspire One is tiny in comparison to my Sony VAIO, but still packs a fair amount of processing power. I was amazed to find that the Atom CPU is actually a Dual Core affair, allowing for some form of multi-tasking. The 1GB of RAM is ideal for XP and should prove to be sufficient for even the most demanding tasks that the netbook can handle. The bottleneck appeared to be in raw processing power when I first booted it up, but after removing unneccesary programs and features, the Acer breezed along.

There's a wealth of programs that Acer have bundled with the laptop, many of which can be removed with no side-effects. Microsoft Works, Google Desktop/Toolbar, McAfee and WinDVD were all uninstalled and free'd up resources. I was surprised to find WinDVD on the netbook, as it doesn't feature a DVD, or in fact any optical drive. I suppose if you invested in an external drive, you'd make use of it, but otherwise it's wasting a small amount of HDD space.

All in all, the Acer Aspire One netbook and indeed, the platform as a whole has intrigued me. I thought it would be a gimick, as the UMPC - but in actual fact, they're ideal for browsing the web or checking your emails whilst watching TV or lying in bed. I'm tempted to get one myself, but perhaps in a blue or black...

Posted: Tuesday 17th March 2009, 22:23pm
Categories: Computers and Technology
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