I had seen these and similar units available for some time. The Acer models caught my attention the first time I came across them browsing through hardware for an order I was placing. They are sleek netbooks with a nice clean paint job resembling a showroom sports car. Ultra portable, thin and lite, these are the best balance of functionality and extreme mobility.
Like I said in my introduction I had seen these online for some time but never bought one. I thought they looked attractive but doubted there efficiency for office use. I didn't want to spend $300+ on something I wasn't sure could meet my needs. I had used a HP mini and hated it. Found the screen too small and unstable. Noticed some flickering with the HP units that turned me off from the netbook PCs. However something about the Acer units kept me curious.
The wife must have noticed how curious I had grown, and surprised me with one for Valentines Day. This was the best gift I could have gotten. This PC is awesome and totally destroyed my skepticism.
The video was amazing! Nice sharp display, perfect resolution for the size. Runs games I never expected it to run. Half-life one based games run great, and the Half-life 2 demo runs playable (although not well enough to be competitive online 15-30fps) Hard-drive has plenty of room for a mobile PC. Divx and Netflix Instant watch runs nice with a great picture quality. Another feature that amazed me was the audio quality. HD audio with great sounding speakers that were remarkably loud!
This PC is also amazingly light. It's solid, well put together, and barely even gets warm when running with full CPU load. The six cell battery gives me almost 7 hours of continuous use. The long battery life means if I take it out on call, and forget my power cord, I do not have to worry about it dying on me. This is the first laptop I have ever came across that can virtually give you a full days use on one charge. This is a great stride for the business user who relies on their PC to work all day.
Office applications run great. OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 2007 runs nicely. My only complaint is the PC is running XP Home. The types of consumers who would benefit most form the system would need XP Professional. This is not Acers fault. Microsoft only allows XP Home to still be sold, and only for netbooks. All other sales of XP has been stopped. This is because even though XP has reach it end-of-sales status, Microsoft has recognized that vista is too much for these low end netbooks. But what about Windows 7? The full release of windows 7 is expected to hit shelves by Christmas, and with the growing popularity of the netbook and Microsoft claims that 7 requires less resources than vista with more features, Windows 7 might be a good choice for the netbook class of portable PCs.
I had already tested Windows 7 on an older Athlon system and it performed surprisingly well. It was also very close to the specs of the Acer. Running a 1.4Ghz with 266Mhz fsb system with 1GB DDR 266Mhz ram it was pretty close. In fact the Acer is more powerful, 1.6Ghz with 533Mhz fsb and 1GB DDR2 533Mhz, it should prove a viable system to run Windows 7.
It was simpler than other users made it seem. Most people who installed other Operating Systems on the Acer Aspire One claim you had to use a USB flash drive properly formatted with the installations files on. Then boot form the flash drive and install windows. That was because a lot of USB CD/DVD drives are not bootable. The first one I tried wasn't. I use a thermaltake USB drive enclosure with a NEC 16X DVD+-RW. Works good for installing and burning on the Acer but not recognized during boot. However I did have a USB to IDE cable I use to recover information from crashed hard-drives. I plugged it into a burner I pulled from a dead emachines PC and it worked liked a charm. Booted from the DVD no problem and installed Windows 7 Beta.
First thing I noticed is that it recognized all the hardware right away. I ran windows update and received all the updates and this PC is amazingly stable. The Aero interface runs flawlessly, with all the effects. Some stuttering but only noticeable by picky users like me. Windows 7 looks beautiful on this machine and really compliments the high quality LCD included with Acer. Even the slide show wallpaper feature runs nice. The wallpapers transition every 5 minutes and do so very smoothly even with full CPU load! (JORDAN VARDEN, Jordos Computer Services, Tupper Lake NY)Get more detail about Acer Aspire One AOD150-1165 10.1-Inch Sapphire Blue Netbook - 6.5 Hour Battery Life.
