Acer Aspire One 10.1" 6 Cell Netbook

If you love Windows XP, make sure this version has the Service Pack 3 update because Microsoft Support ends on July 13, 2010…

In for one – I have a free shipping code from a while back and have wanted a netbook for when I’m outta town and need to get work done.

Since I’m girly I would have liked purple or something, but I figure I can always skin it. Been waiting on a 6-cell deal that doesn’t have the accessories bundled in (I’ve got enough gear.) Sweet.

I got this netbook for my birthday last September. I use it mainly for surfing the net and it’s great for that. Mine has the 3 cell battery and one thing I figured out is when it’s off and I leave the battery in, it will go completely dead in just a few days however if I remove the battery it will stay fully charged… not sure if this is common with all of these or just mine. Other than that this netbook does what it designed for.

I’ve had it for about a year now. As far as netbooks go, this is a good one.

The battery life is great, the screen is nice. The WIFI reception is very good. Light and looks stylish.

The power is pretty good considering its size, and is what you should expect from any netbook in this class. Which means you can surf the web, use Office applications, watch AVI files off your hard drive, and play Flash games, and do all rather smoothly, as examples. Be sure to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, as it’s relatively cheap and very easy, and provides a good power boost.

My only real quips are with the input devices. The keyboard is not full-size, like many other netbooks (ie. Gateway) have. The keys are smaller than normal. Unless you have small hands, you won’t want to write any long papers on this, but it’s fine for note-taking, brainstorming, IM-ing, Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. The touchpad is rather small too, and for some reason doesn’t maintain the wide aspect ratio of the screen (it’s rather a perfect square), which makes things feel cramped. Also, the upper border of the touchpad is painted on, rather than being a tactile ridge, so you can’t feel when you’ve hit it, and it’s very easy for your finger to slip off, leaving you wondering why the pointer stopped moving.

The quips are pretty minor. Again, as netbooks go, this one is good. If I could do things over again I might have gone for one with a full-size keyboard, but I’m not exactly kicking myself for having bought this one. There could be other sacrifices if I’d went with Gateway etc. This one is serving its purpose nicely for notes during class-time and entertainment during between-class time, and entertainment all other times too, actually.

Flash can be pretty bad (running on Ubuntu), but HTML 5 video on Youtube on Chrome is smooth.

I’ve had this computer for a year and a half and it was getting over 5 hours of battery life! Perfect for taking to class all day long and taking notes and surfing the web.

It’s true, it doesn’t stream videos very well. But I think it’s a great little computer to tote around :slight_smile:

Is this a new unit or a refirb??

refurb…

disagree… im on a d250 and i use it for netflix all the time, also i have zero problems with youtube.

ive upgraded to 2 gb of ram, but even before then i had none of those issues

I agree with you… most video streaming issues arise from the speed of your internet connection… even DSL at 1.5 Mb/sec will appear degraded…

Info on Video Streaming Problems

My Girl friend has the D250 with 6 cell battery. Setting the screen for a readable brightness and using Wi-fi she gets about 3 hours maybe 3 and 1/4.

I’ll leave the ladies to answer this one.

I get about 6 and a half hours using Ubuntu Netbook remix. I can’t comment on the XP usage because I installed ubuntu before ever booting it into XP. I have yet to have any issues with drivers. Skype works great (after a minor tweak to microphone settings)

If you don’t have one by now get one. An Acer ONE!

I purchased this netbook about 2 weeks ago from Woot!, only it came with the accessory pack. After a week of usage, I get about 2.5 - 3 hours of usage on a battery charge. I watched a 2 hour movie, had a few other programs running, and didn’t have to plug it in while movie was playing. Overall, very happy with the battery life.

Oh, forgot, using WinXP and no other upgrades to it, yet. Going to add 1GB of RAM soon.

You might get better streaming performance if you upgrade your Flash to the new 10.1 beta, the GPU in this netbook doesn’t support the acceleration but it might still help.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

I might upgrade, I really like Windows 7…although since this has XP, not Vista, I’m not sure whether it’s worth the extra money.
If you’re a student, on the other hand, I’d definitely upgrade: then you can buy it for $65, all you need is a .edu email address.
http://www.microsoft.com/student/en/us/software/windows-7.aspx

Has anyone tried running Microsoft Office programs on this. (Excel, PowerPoint, Access?) Does is handle large excel files ok?

It will handle them “ok” as in it will run them. However, depending on the size of the files it can be painfully slow. Access and Excel 2002 or newer like to put entire files into RAM if they can fit them there. If they can (in this case, probably 300MB files or smaller), you’ll find it to be slow compared to a core 2 duo but still reasonably useful; it should be able to do an update query to a 300MB file in a few minutes tops.

Once you get to the point when you can no longer fit the whole file in RAM, even if its just 1MB over, you can expect the same query to take 5-15 times as long, and that is not an exaggeration. Access and Excel do not do well with files that do not fit in RAM. If you use larger files like I do, upgrade the RAM to 2GB, or, if you upgrade the OS to Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can stick an SD card or a USB stick to use ReadyBoost, which will effectively add to your RAM as well, and Excel and Access both take advantage of ReadyBoost seemlessly.

Shrug

I have the 9 inch, and I occasionally use it to play WoW on the patio. It’s a perfectly capable machine for doing things while you are away from your desktop. It’s not really designed for heavy, long-term use; it’s more of a coffee table thing.

no wifi-n, no video out in the form of S-video or HDMI
Acer has made the whole Aspire one series so confusing, they have like a hundred different variations of Aspire One, so be careful which one you buy, and go thru all the specs.