My new Acer Aspire One mini review
Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 10:07 pm
I thought I'd give a mini review of my new Acer Aspire One.
After hearing Dann go on and on about his eeepc
I have been looking at getting one myself. However, I also read about the new Acer Aspire One, which is another of these UMPC's that are all over the place. The Acer sells for about $375 to $399 new, but I went to Circuit City just before leaving on vacation with my wife and kids and they had an open box return that was only $330 so I quickly snapped it up. The one I got is dark blue and works great.
The Acer Aspire One has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 8gb solid state drive, 512 MB ram, 8.9" screen, webcam, three USB ports, ethernet, two SD slots, Atheros wireless, VGA out, and an Intel integrated video chipset. It is almost completely silent. The battery life on the stock 3 cell battery is almost exactly 2.5 hours. You can get a larger battery which will get you about 4 hours. It weighs less than 2 pounds and is running Linpus Linux, which is basically stock Fedora 8 with a custom desktop on top of XFCE. You can easily change a setting to get the XFCE right-click menu in which case you then have a full fledged Linux desktop. The boot up time is amazing -- I clocked it at about 15 seconds. It suspends and resumes fine, although with that quick of a boot, I usually just shut it down to save the battery. It includes Thunar, Firefox, a custom email/rss reader, custom chat client, 10 ot 12 games including SuperTux, OpenOffice.org, mplayer, and lots of other little apps for viewing photos, playing media etc. You can easily add more software from the standard Fedora GUI tool (Pirut) or in the terminal using yum. It appears they also include flash, acrobat reader, and all the video/audio codecs you would need. The stock install uses about 3GB of the 8GB drive. I have not added much other than OpenSSH, which it does not include by default. I'm using it right now to type this and find it pretty easy to type on.
The two main drawbacks are the trackpad and the extra RAM slot. The trackpad works fine, but the two buttons are on the left and right of the trackpad instead of below it, so it makes clicking and dragging virtually a two-handed affair. The extra RAM slot is impossible to get to, and from what I gather on the Acer One forums, you basically have to completely disassemble the unit to add RAM. But, the upside is that this thing is totally hackable. People have changed out the 8GB SS drive for either a larger one or a hard drive. Other folks have added a 3G wireless card and bluetooth. Also, the standard 512 MB ram is really all you need. This thing is really zippy, and OpenOffice.org even starts up in about 7 seconds.
I guess that's about it. Feel free to post questions but since I'm on vacation and not at the computer very much this week, it might take me a couple of days to respond.
Definitely two thumbs up, especially at this price.
After hearing Dann go on and on about his eeepc
I have been looking at getting one myself. However, I also read about the new Acer Aspire One, which is another of these UMPC's that are all over the place. The Acer sells for about $375 to $399 new, but I went to Circuit City just before leaving on vacation with my wife and kids and they had an open box return that was only $330 so I quickly snapped it up. The one I got is dark blue and works great.The Acer Aspire One has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 8gb solid state drive, 512 MB ram, 8.9" screen, webcam, three USB ports, ethernet, two SD slots, Atheros wireless, VGA out, and an Intel integrated video chipset. It is almost completely silent. The battery life on the stock 3 cell battery is almost exactly 2.5 hours. You can get a larger battery which will get you about 4 hours. It weighs less than 2 pounds and is running Linpus Linux, which is basically stock Fedora 8 with a custom desktop on top of XFCE. You can easily change a setting to get the XFCE right-click menu in which case you then have a full fledged Linux desktop. The boot up time is amazing -- I clocked it at about 15 seconds. It suspends and resumes fine, although with that quick of a boot, I usually just shut it down to save the battery. It includes Thunar, Firefox, a custom email/rss reader, custom chat client, 10 ot 12 games including SuperTux, OpenOffice.org, mplayer, and lots of other little apps for viewing photos, playing media etc. You can easily add more software from the standard Fedora GUI tool (Pirut) or in the terminal using yum. It appears they also include flash, acrobat reader, and all the video/audio codecs you would need. The stock install uses about 3GB of the 8GB drive. I have not added much other than OpenSSH, which it does not include by default. I'm using it right now to type this and find it pretty easy to type on.
The two main drawbacks are the trackpad and the extra RAM slot. The trackpad works fine, but the two buttons are on the left and right of the trackpad instead of below it, so it makes clicking and dragging virtually a two-handed affair. The extra RAM slot is impossible to get to, and from what I gather on the Acer One forums, you basically have to completely disassemble the unit to add RAM. But, the upside is that this thing is totally hackable. People have changed out the 8GB SS drive for either a larger one or a hard drive. Other folks have added a 3G wireless card and bluetooth. Also, the standard 512 MB ram is really all you need. This thing is really zippy, and OpenOffice.org even starts up in about 7 seconds.
I guess that's about it. Feel free to post questions but since I'm on vacation and not at the computer very much this week, it might take me a couple of days to respond.
Definitely two thumbs up, especially at this price.
