i caved and bought the acer aspire one (d250) from the 4/6/10 sellout.
it is certainly a great machine. i upgraded the RAM to 2GB (gSkill) immediately, and it screams. boots faster than my quad core desktop.
can’t say the gateway piques my interest at all.
It would be a better deal if it were an iPad.
In fact, it could be an infinite number of more valuable things.
I bought one. It looks like a good deal for my wife to use at home and keep all her music on for her ipods.
From my experience it took me a little work, but nothing too difficult IMHO. The only two problems I’ve noticed have to do with the CPU and the built-in wireless (ath9k). Things may have changed since when I installed Xubuntu late last year when I bought mine.
I am currently running Xubuntu 9.10 on mine. With 9.10, you will probably want to recompile the kernel to fix the PowerNow CPU feature so that it scales the CPU down properly when there is low demand. I personally used the 2.6.32.2 source provided by the Ubuntu kernel PPA. Here is a forum thread containing the patches and a link to the needed DSDT table for kernels that do not have the PowerNow CPU scaling fix.
Also, you will probably need to install a newer version of the wireless driver to get it to work properly. I can’t remember offhand what I ended up using, but either the backport modules package or one of: compat-wireless bleeding edge or the latest stable version compat-wireless for 2.6.32 (since that’s the kernel I’m using as previously mentioned).
Lastly, I just tested 10.04 Beta 2. The results are: the wireless doesn’t work – at least with my AP (keeps deauthenticating for no reason), the PowerNow fix isn’t implemented, and the graphics driver seems to be borked as there are horizontal lines going up and down the screen in X.
32-bit Atom (N270 at that), only 1GB of RAM, crappy Intel graphics chipset, smaller screen and resolution, no 802.11n (only b and g), and a red shell? No thanks.
You play WoW on this thing?? I have one and I love it but I always figured it would bomb out trying to play wow…I also installed XP Pro on mine…runs great, only time it gets bogged down or kind of choppy is when i’m watching youtube vids (sometimes) or listening to music (sometimes)
Overall this thing is great!
It’s good for a netbook! I run win7 and ubuntu on it with no problems. I’ve been able to run 720p divx but havent tried matroska because I figured it’d be way too demanding. I use it for music surfing and school work, so it’s perfect for me.
It definitely heats up sometimes, but it’s manageable, it never got to the point of overheating for me and usually just runs pretty cool. I work at a computer shop and we got this Dell XPS laptop in that would run about 3x as hot as this netbook and would heat up all over…mine heats up on the left side only sometimes.
What is the output for the HD? Does it go as high as 720p or is it just 480p? Also what is the difference between led and lcd? it says this monitor is both
720p = 1280x720 and the resolution of the built-in LCD on this netbook is slightly higher than that (1366x768). Therefore, there is enough resolution to watch a 720p video without resizing it.
The display on this netbook is an LCD that is LED backlit. This means the LCD uses LEDs as a backlight source instead of say CCFL.
That has much less memory and it has the intel processor that most reviews say are slow in a netbook.
You can easily upgrade that netbook to 2GB RAM for about $30, however, the Intel processor (Atom N270 1.6 GHz) to which you refer, is made for netbooks…
On another note, for THIS sellout.woot! offering: if you aren’t going to upgrade to Windows 7 (which you should due to Vista’s huge RAM and processor appetite), you should update Vista to Service Pack 2…
Awesome Netbook, I purchased one on Woot in January and its perfect. Since June I had been debating on which netbook to buy… Asus, Acer… then reading all the specs with the AMD, I saw this one the LT3103. I was drawn to the Asus by the best battery life but seeing the performance of the AMD and only a few hours difference in battery I went for the Gateway. The battery is actually very good and lasts longer than I anticipated. The price is a bit cheaper than the Asus which was nice, but you get double the ram and almost 100gigs more HD along with one of the best netbook screens on the market. It still has Vista, but turning off all the bloat software it works great, I plan on installing xp and also win 7 to check out performance in the next few weeks. The only cons I can say is that it took a few days to get use to the flat keys on the spacious keyboard and HD higher than 480 is a bit choppy, but hey for a netbook it rocks! I just read this review the other day and saw a post below with it. Read it and buy the Gateway!
[QUOTE=regnar11b, post:33, topic:278147]
Awesome Netbook, I purchased one on Woot in January and its perfect. Since June I had been debating on which netbook to buy… Asus, Acer… then reading all the specs with the AMD, I saw this one the LT3103. I was drawn to the Asus by the best battery life but seeing the performance of the AMD and only a few hours difference in battery I went for the Gateway. The battery is actually very good and lasts longer than I anticipated. The price is a bit cheaper than the Asus which was nice, but you get double the ram and almost 100gigs more HD along with one of the best netbook screens on the market. It still has Vista, but turning off all the bloat software it works good, I plan on installing xp and also win 7 to check out performance in the next few weeks. The only cons I can say is that it took a few days to get use to the flat keys on the spacious keyboard and HD higher than 480 is a bit choppy, but hey for a netbook it rocks! I just read this review the other day and saw a post below with it. Read it and buy the Gateway!
why would anyone want an iPad ? no memory, no keypad and it will be outdated in 6months with a 4g.
I’d rather wait for a solid Netbook with an Intel Atom N450, webcam, blue tooth, etc. Hell, may even wait for the next generation of Atom processors.
I’d rather wait for a solid Netbook with an Intel Atom N450, webcam, blue tooth, etc. Hell, may even wait for the next generation of Atom processors.
I’d rather wait for a solid Netbook with an Intel Atom N450, webcam, blue tooth, etc. Hell, may even wait for the next generation of Atom processors.
This netbook does have a webcam.
I bought this exact netbook during an earlier offering. I had some misgivings about the operating system and the six cell battery. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. I get four to six hours of battery life when in “balanced” mode, and the operating system hasn’t bothered me so much that I’ve felt motivated to replace it. I haven’t noticed any appreciable slowdown when running more than one program, but I don’t use processor-heavy games or graphics programs, either.
I’m not partial to touchpads, so I found a great little cordless USB mouse which works perfectly with this machine. I have a portable USB CD/DVD, which is shared among all the laptops/netbooks in the house and is a very handy addition.
One of the nicest features is the relatively large 11.x" screen. My eyesight isn’t the greatest, so I have the screen set to magnify and can leave my glasses elsewhere. The netbook is very light, much lighter than any of the laptops I’ve used over the years and is easily carried to anyplace I’d take notes. The keyboard feels full sized, and I’ve had little adjustment to touch typing.
All in all, it’s a dynamite little machine for the money. I keep my music, movies and audiobooks on an external USB hard drive, and backup onto 32Gb USB thumb drives. I got a nice little foam envelope to protect the netbook from minor mishaps and for under $350, my laptop needs have been met. yay.