Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

I recently purchased an Acer Aspire One, so I could sample the whole netbook craze. I went with Acer mostly because I like their product line; the Acer Aspire 5050 laptop that I’d been using for the last couple years has worked great, and was very easy on the wallet as well. My experience has been that Acer makes good, simple, affordable systems, without a lot of the frou-frou that OEMs like HP like to throw in. It also helped that John Scalzi wrote a pretty good review of an Acer Aspire One on his blog. So I said, why not?

A big one of my concerns with getting a netbook was the size of the keyboard, and how awkward typing might end up being as a result of having to use such tiny keys. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised with my Aspire One; the keyboard works perfectly, I almost never hit another key on accident, and I think I can actually type a little faster/better on it than on my regular keyboard at work. I also find that the Fn-key-based numeric pad works fairly well, without any straining or difficulty to type out numbers using it.

One thing that took some getting used to was how the trackpad’s left- and right-mouse buttons are placed on either side of the trackpad itself, instead of snuggling each other above or below the pad. This wasn’t too bad, especially since I only have to use it when I happen to be sans flat surface. My retractable USB mini optical mouse has seen much use with this one.

The 8.9″ screen is a bit small, but well, duh – it’s a netbook. I’ve found that this doesn’t interfere too much with my web browsing, since much of it is text-heavy, but I’d definitely prefer a larger screen for some of the longer texts I read. Slashdot and blog posts work great though, and requires an acceptable number of deployments of my scrolling finger.

I went with the 160GB hard drive over the 4GB SSD, simply because I do tend to hoard data and 4GB simply isn’t enough. Yes, an external drive can mitigate that, but the advantage of having a fair amount of storage natively was well worth the risk of failure that it takes. It sleeps and resumes without any issue when I close the lid, and to date, I don’t think it has sustained any notable damage despite being lugged around everywhere. Then again, I am probably less reckless than the average joe.

Some other misc. facts:

• I bought the whole thing for $260, Buy-It-Now with free shipping, on eBay. Definitely worth the cost.
• One of the major reasons I wanted a netbook was to reduce the weight of my carrying bag that I take to work. Even my fairly lightweight Aspire 5050 was hurting my back a little, when you added it to all the paperwork and network tools that I typically carry with me. Even the adapter caused a little strain. But the netbook has made my bag much easier on the spine. Don’t underestimate that value of this to me.
• It came with an XP Home license, which I’m keeping for now simply because the machine seems to work well enough with it. I’d like to throw the Ubuntu netbook remix on it eventually, maybe dual-boot, but I’ve been too busy to do it lately.
• It has the factory-default 1GB of DDR2 RAM in it, which I plan to upgrade to it’s max of 1.5GB soon enough. I haven’t seen any real problem with performance that would require it, but I like to think it will make my attempt to run Unreal Tournament 2004 on it go smoother.
• I’ve used the VGA port to connect to projectors during my lectures, and never had a problem, despite running at the off-beat 1024×600 resolution. The Intel graphics driver that came with it handles dual-monitors and screen cloning without issue.
• I have three USB ports, which works out well, leaving me room to plug in my mouse and flash drive and still have on left. The multimedia card reader hasn’t seen much use, but I can see it being handy down the road when I finally get a new digital camera.
• The built-in webcam is a nice addition that I doubt I’ll ever use, but I like that I have it on there. Never know when you want to take a quick picture or record a short video.
• Battery life is typically about two hours, which is just okay, but nothing that impressive. I may try to throw in a six-cell eventually and see what that gets me up to.
• Wireless B/G connection works great, no issues; same for the 10/100 NIC that is included. I love when things just work.
• The built-in speakers are pretty faint, as you’d probably suspect, but carrying a pair of earbuds with me has proven to be a good solution when I want to watch a video on YouTube.
• I was able to find a car adapter and tote bag for it for less than $10 each, free shipping, on eBay. They both came from China, which I guess fits since I’m pretty sure thats where my netbook came from too. I do like that there are plenty of cheap accessories available for it.
• Not being able to load or burn discs was a definite minus, but this was easily rectified by purchasing a laptop-size USB-powered DVD-RW for about $50 on Amazon.
• In case anyone was wondering, the processor is an Intel Atom 1.6GHz with 533MHz FSB.

Because I had the cash at the time, I splurged and bought an Asus Eee 900 just to compare the two. Here’s what I found:

• The keyboard on the Eee wasn’t as easy to type with.
• The battery life was not very good, though it may be specific to the one I bought, since it was sold as used.
• It did come with some specialized Linux OS pre-installed, but I’m really not impressed with it; I’d rather run Windows XP Home on it any day (though I think this will end up being where I test the Ubuntu netbook remix in the near future).
• It featured a 4GB SSD drive, which is kinda cool, but as I mentioned before, I don’t think the performance and mobility advantages are quite worth the hit in storage capability, especially when my regular old SATA drive in the Aspire One is fast enough and durable enough.

Not terrible, but seeing as how I can buy an Aspire One for about the same price (if not cheaper), I’d definitely recommend it over the Eee any day. I think the MSI Wind comes pretty close to the Aspire One, and if I were to investigate another netbook, that would be it.

Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have netbooks out, but I see them as more of the johnny-come-latelys of the netbook trend. I haven’t heard anyone talk about HP’s, while Dell’s and Lenovo’s models seem more like smaller laptops than true netbooks. I really dig the size of the Eee/One/Wind; it’s not too big, but not too small, either. Just right for the purpose. Why go for a half-breed?

I think there is something inherently cool about a machine so small and portable that can do so much. Pretty much everything I use my computer for can be done on this machine, considering that my usage mainly consists of reading text, browsing the web, running SSH or RDP, and maybe a bit of programming. I don’t require any kind of hardware that wasn’t around four years ago, and I’m happy to pay less and get less in this kind of circumstance.

Overall, I rate it 5/5.