Netbook Review - Acer Aspire One

I finally ventured into the world of the "netbooks".

I grabbed the Acer Aspire One 10.1 Inch Display Netbook it cost me about $199.00 , not bad at Walmart even.  

This thing is pretty nice. It has the Intel Atom processor which seems to work fairly well for this small laptop. It's not a computer the kids would want to play games on but for what most of us want it works just fine. I personally like this guy a lot more than I figured I would.

The whole purpose I had for this machine is for something to stay in touch with when we are traveling. Something that we can read mail on, use a webcam and browse the internet and most importantly is small lightweight and easy to lug around through the airports and other terminals.

I have used the webcam in some pretty remote areas and it's amazingly good quality, I'm impressed. The microphone is not bad either. I installed Skype and I can easily chat with a video window to most people I know that are on Skype.

The mouse touch pad works well but I personally prefer to take a small optical travel mouse and plug it in ..

This is just me but the keyboard seems tight to me , but I have big hands, my better half thinks its just perfect.. so take that as you want.

It runs XP home not Vista.. personally I prefer XP as I'm more used to it and Vista to me is just XP with visual bells and whistles.

The last trip I installed my Slingbox Player (see my Hub on that) and was able to watch TV remotely from distant parts of the world. It worked amazingly well, I was actually shocked.

I do not have MS Office installed on it but I do have OpenOffice the free Office like suite for XP and it works great. I can edit all day.

Email works perfectly.. Express is what I use.

The screen is A+ it's very clear and crisp,

I have not run a exhaustive test on the battery life but I seem to get about 2 hour of so of use before I plug in. Frankly that enough for me.. the purpose of this PC is for connectivity and such on the road, mainly vacations and get aways so I do not want to be on the PC for more than 2 hours.

The one downside I see is there is no CDROM or DVD player included with it so you can't watch DVD's on it or more importantly install CD/DVD based software. i'm sure you can buy a cheap USB DVD/CD player to fix this though. I personally do not need it.

On the flip side the hard Drive is huge at 160GB. I use this mainly to take pictures from my camera and download them to the PC for storage and therefore freeing up my camera memory for more pictures. The built in SD slot works great for this.

I have one final comment, the trackpad is nice but the clickers are on the left and right of the pad. This takes some getting used to, I'm not sure if I like it or not yet so go try it yourself if your picky.

Some of the pure facts of this netbook:

• Intel® Atom™ Processor N450 (1.66GHz)
• 1GB DDR2 SDRAM single channel memory
• 160GB (5,400RPM) SATA Hard Drive
• 10.1" WSVGA CrystalBrite™ display that displays a resolution of 1024 x 600)
• Built in Wireless 802.11 b/g/n
• 10/100 Ethernet port
• Built in Webcam (nice) and Microphone.
• 3 USB ports.
• Built in card reader (Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, RS-MMC, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, xD Picture Card) nice as well)

Things I like - the Pros:

• Light easy to carry.
• Built pretty sturdy ( not too flimsy) more solid than my Toshiba A305 Laptop.
• Crisp nice screen (very nice)
• Wireless works well built in ethernet port as well for hotels that still want a cord for access. Battery life
• Huge 160GB Hard Drive
• Reasonable performance for most tasks

Things I do not like - the Cons:

• Not many cons
• NO CDROM drive.
• Display is a bit small for those of us that are well.. eyesight challenged due to experience ;-)
• The AC adpter is a grounded 3 prong cord which can be a pain, most of my other laptops are straight 2 pronger's.
  
• Small Keyboard

Conclusion:

So far I'd buy another one, this thing is perfect for a travel laptop. It suites my needs fine and I'm a pretty serious techie PC person. Unless you want a gaming PC I suspect this would suite your needs as well. As always, come to your own conclusions