Acer Aspire One

Purchasing a new PC is a task made up of choice after choice, after choice. Price, support, portability and power are some of the many considerations you must ponder over.

In my case, primarily I wanted something cheap and portable. First off I checkout ebay and it seems for the price of a 2^nd hand laptop you might as well go for a new one as manufacturers seem to be making hardware more and more affordable. After checking out a number of retailers I took the plunge with MISCO and purchased a Acer Aspire One, it seems my choice was a good one. The review below will explain why.

Small and light and therefore very portable the AA1 looks good and fits in my small backpack (handy for someone who gets to work on a skateboard). Being a Netbook rather than a traditional Laptop I was abit worried this might cause problems with either seeing the screen or hitting keys, but none of these are issues, the keyboard is lovely to type on and the screen size is fine, althou it could be bigger as it has a large border but larger screen means larger price.

Acer offer the Aspire One in a number of versions, with Windows or Linux, solid state (SSD) or hard drive, blue or white, etc. etc. I opted for the Linux version with 0.5GB memory and 120GB hard disc. The the SSD is small and slow and has maximum number of writes before it dies and if required I can upgrade the memory (not as easy as you might expect).

Windows is slow and restrictive so I went for Linux. Knowing some versions of Linux can be hard to work with I was very pleased when I first used Linpus (Linux version from Acer), everything seems to just work and was intuitive so if you are new to Linux you would get on fine with Linpus.

When I first used the laptop I was pleased to see it came with all the basics, OpenOffice (open source and therefore free version of Microsoft Office), email, web browser, everything you will need for basic computing but like most people I have my preferences, so I set about installing things like Skype, my preferred messenger (Pidgin), media player (vlc). It was very easy to add software using the Add/Remove Software option or downloading RPM's (Linus install packages). One thing that particularly impressed me was that Skype went in without a problem and I made my first video call almost by accident, proving the built in webcam, mic and speaker to be good and working.

The laptop was now in a state I could do most common tasks with, but after a few days use I found that Linpus seemed restrictive. Acer had altered certain bits of standard software to work nicely on the AA1 which is cool if your just going to use standard features but as you start to install more stuff they start to confict and cause problems. I read that Fedora 10 was a pretty good version of Linux and worked nicely with the AA1.

There are alot online posts and support regarding the AA1 so it did not take long to find a guide to installing Fedora 10 on my netbook and now I am enjoying the freedom of what I would consider a 'real' operating system. There are a few tweaks required in get Fedora running nicely on the AA1, but overall I (and many others) would say Fedora 10 works out the box.

Amongst the many reasons I believe Fedora to be a good choice for the AA1 are: it works well, you get a good choice of window managers (desktop's), it is fast and it is a real version of Linux. Two of the main reasons that make Linux better than Windows is that most things seem to work solidly and it is very light weight and therefore fast. As and when you require software you can just download it using the easy to use software managers, whereas Windows seems to come with everything you might want, making it heavy and slow when you might only use 10% of what is available.

The AA1 is not without its faults as I am learning slowly, but what computer is 100% perfect? One on the most annoying points is that the Wifi card seems abit flaky, dropping out connections and sometimes not connecting at all. Apparently this can be fixed by swapping the internal Wifi card, I am yet to try this thou but I am hopeful.

Also as mentioned before, I think the memory could do with an upgrade which will be tricking but by no means impossible. I guess that is due to Acer wanting to get extra money though offering an upgrade service. It works out best to do this yourself as the larger memory version of the AA1 was and extra £50, whereas if you purchase the memory separately it is only £7, I guess it depends if you are comfortable taking your AA1 apart and putting it back together.

Overall I would give the Acer Aspire One 9 out of 10, not perfect but nearly. It is much better than expected and suites my needs very well. As yet there seems to nothing it does not do. For around £200 you would find it hard to do any better.

Ben.