Geeks.com, known for their cheap laptops, sent us the Acer Aspire One for a review. Thom wrote a review of the popular laptop recently, but here's my take on it. Update: After this review went up, and within two hours, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 (time is 4:10 AM here, couldn't sleep until I had Ubuntu in there). Using this very nice tutorial, I have everything up and running.
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Member since:
2005-07-22
Acer's service is pretty good. Finally put it to the test when my Aspire 5570 wouldn't power up. Got one year extra of warranty coverage for free so I didn't have to pay anything to have the HDD replaced (SMART failure warning) and the mainboard and USB DC board fixed. While I was at the service center I noticed they had a promo for the Aspire One's extended warranty.
All of the Acers I have had Linpus pre-installed, but I never used it, installing Windows and Ubuntu instead.
Member since:
2006-08-09
Eugenia is a whiner slash perfectionist and that's why she's the perfect reviewer. Every corporation should have a team of Eugenia's to criticise their stuff so it gets better.
It's not a coincidence that überwhiner slash perfectionist Steve J. of Apple is credited with lots of perfectionist products that I personally don't buy but can understand why many others think they rule.
It's too bad Eugenia that you don't have the time or guts anymore to allow comments on your blog, which I had always thought was the fun part of a blog, but anyway, if you haven't sold your soul to the devil (I mean Acer) yet I might even consider buying an Acer 'netbook' (god I hate that word) after this review (some day), now that it seems it's built rather well and all. :-)
What I mean is I'd always been under the impression that Acer's build quality is appalling, and much of what I've seen confirms that.
Edited 2008-10-31 10:55 UTC
Member since:2006-07-30
Agreed. I wonder if there's a company out there that makes money out of telling other companies precisely in which ways their products suck...
I'm also sort of relieved that the review was pretty positive because I just bought an Aspire One (the hdd version).
Member since:2005-08-11
Member since:2006-07-30
Member since:
2005-08-02
I have an AAO (150Bw) and it's a really nice hackable laptop.
- I installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) on it, runs very well
- It runs Haiku! (no sound and wireless unfortunately)
- when you exchange the Atheros WiFi card with e.g. a Dell DW1390/1490 you can have a fully working hackintosh running on it as well.
there's an empty slot in the bottom of the AAO. That is reserved for a 3G PCI-E card. These are readily available (although expensive), and are known to work. Next year an AAO with 3G will be released as well.
The big minus of the AAO is that the BIOS only supports up to 2GB RAM, but the on-board 512MB RAM cannot be switched off. So this means when you add a 2GB SODIMM, the device won't boot. So, essentially you're stuck with a max of 1.5GB RAM (when you add a 1GB SODIMM to it)
Member since:
2005-10-12
Member since:2005-06-28
Member since:2005-07-11
Member since:
2005-11-05
A lot of folks seem to think the Acer netbooks are the pick of the bunch. And if I were to get one, I'd probably get an Acer too. But I'm not really tempted. At the moment, the whole netbook thang strikes me as too much a product (the Atom chipset) in search of a market. Spending some more (but a lot less than the cost of an Apple laptop) will get me a fully loaded but still eminently portable gizmo like the Samsung Q210 series of 12-inchers. This will do far, far more and probably last a lot longer too. And there are plenty of less expensive but well specified and still portable laptops from Acer themselves as well as from downmarket "value" brands.
Netbooks have flagged up one thing, though. If the makers can get these netbooks in at their current prices, then how come so many mobile smartphones are astronomically expensive by comparison? Where I live, some of the more recent Windows 6-7 smartphones cost 50-100 per cent more than a netbook. Maybe an unintended consequence of the netbook phenomenon is that mobile makers will be forced to come back down to earth.
Edited 2008-10-31 11:51 UTC
Member since:2006-03-27
Product in search of a market? There's definitely multiple markets. Here's at least one...
Students.
I've see so many of these "netbooks" around the campus and I'm planning to get one myself. Their size and mass makes them ideal. 12.1" laptops tend to be expensive, and anything bigger than that tends to be too big or heavy to be conveniently carried around frequently. My 12.1" is just slightly shorter than an A4 page... and people used to think it was tiny.
The price is affordable and young people tend to be able to find disposable income for this sort of thing. 2 weeks pay vs 6 months pay. Both do internet, word processing and most other tasks a student will need a computer for.
Member since:2005-11-05
Interesting, as I live in a student town (around 30,000 of them in term time). To my surprise I've so far seen hardly any netbooks in the cafes and wifi places, and the ones I have seen have all been with folks who did not look like students. Mostly I see Dells and the smaller Macbooks among the students. This is in the UK, though. I guess it's possible the students are given recommendations or requirements about the kind of laptops they are expected to have. The other gizmo I see a lot of is the iPhone, often in the hands of those whose parents must be paying the monthly bill. I wonder whether a lot of folks have decided to pass by netbooks and centralize stuff on their phone, using full notebooks for academe or work. Or, they are lucky to have wealthy and generous parents ...
Member since:
2005-07-06
I want to preface this by saying I'm not an Apple fanboy, non of my main computers are Macs and I've never been overly happy with OS X. All that being said my iBook as the only laptop I've ever had where evrything just worked every time. Reading the instructions and caveats in the Ubuntu link and the warnings about how problems like how you may or may not lose data on your memory card if you forget to remove it before suspending doesn't fill me with confidence.
Suspend/resume strikes me as the one feature I really want to work flawlessly every single time in a netbook. I want to open the lid and do what I want to do within seconds, and then close the lid and put it back in my bag secure in the knowedge that everything will work next time I open it. It's not that I'm afraid of hacking away at my hardware, but sometimes it's nice with stuff that just does what I want it to do with a minimum of fuss.
I really wish apple would make a small laptop weighing under 1 kg with a screen less than 10". I'd happily pay 2-3 times the price of the Acer.
Member since:
2005-07-01
What's the SSD performance like? I was reading somewhere (possibly here) a debate which seemed to conclude that SSDs were much slower than HDDs, particularly for small files. This was supposedly something that clever kernel stuff (well, just delayed writing actually) could fix but, in Linux at least, this hasn't happened?
Oh yeah, here it is:
http://www.osnews.com/story/20450/Sinofsky_Demoed_Windows_7_on_a_Ne...
"If you're buying a netbook, avoid the SSD models. They might be cheaper, but you are going to get extremely frustrated with the SSD."
Member since:2005-06-28
Member since:
2006-01-08
I got to borrow a friends ACer aspire for a couple of days.
I've always liked the idea of linux, but generally found it to be a massive PITA and so far away from anything user friendly (even latest ubuntu still requires frequent cli input)
To me linpus lite is the best, linux distro I've used in terms of user-friendliness.
Out of the box, it just works, everything is there that I need regularly, Getting online is simplicity itself - I don't need to know whether I'm using wep/wpa. PSK etc...
I think it's brilliant.
so much so, I went and got one for myself. Added a 16gb sd card too.
There's even a hack to access the xfce menu options - it's not there by default because I guess 99% of aspire one users will never change it, but it's easily done if you want.
I love open source, but at the end of the day I don't care enough about it to take off applications that work pretty well just because they're not FOSS. I'm guessing 99.9% of aspire one users feel the same. it's not broken don't fix it (and the acer apps really work pretty well IMO)
From the "just works" philosphy I think this is far and away the best linux experience regular users will have.
If only all linux was like this - dead simple - no configuration/cli needed, butis there, under-the-hood if you want to hack about.
Member since:
2007-05-27
Member since:
2008-10-31
I just bought one of these a couple a days ago, but got the one with a 120GB drive in it and 1GB ram for the same price as geek.com is selling the 8GB flash model.
Welcome to wallyworld...
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=10575196
Much better deal IMO.
Member since:2006-01-03
The $350 Aspire One has 1GB RAM, 120GB HD, 3-cell battery, and .3MP webcam, while the $400 has 1GB RAM, 160GB HD, 6-cell battery, and 1.3MP webcam. (see NewEgg or TheNerds.net) The 6-cell battery alone sells for $100 (Provantage). Crucial sells a 1GB chip for $20 to replace the 512MB and bringing the total to 1.5GB, but be prepared to take out a dozen screws, unplug the keyboard & trackpad, & lift up the mobo. I think the speaker sucks at loud volume, but even cheap headphones sound great. The smooth plastic case is perfect for fingerprints. The One is about the only sub-$900 netbook (UMPC) with a good key layout for the right Shift and arrow keys and includes Page Up and Page Down. If you use XP, disable a couple dozen Services (BlackViper).
Member since:
2006-02-13
As for protecting your data in case of theft, I fear that no login password or application-specific mechanism will be sufficient. Of course it depends on the value of your data, but I think I have to set up encryption on a filesystem level, at least for /home. The performance penalty tends to decrease with modern systems, while the value of data tends to increase.
LUKS, dm-crypt and LVM might be worth a try.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=31333&sid=504e4b4055f59339...
Edited 2008-10-31 16:38 UTC
Member since:
2008-10-31
This review is great and sums up mostly everything that I have experienced with mine.
I purchased the Acer one with the 160gb hard drive and 6 cell battery. I believe the webcam on the 6 cell version is a megapixel camera.
I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on it and have everything working. There are a few problems that I have which I hope will be ironed out over driver updates:
1. The wireless is sketchy at times. Sometimes the wireless will quit working and in order to fix it I have to completely power off the laptop and turn it back on. Removing modules, restarting wpa, etc doesn't work. I have tried everything I can think of. I blame this on a faulty module, as the issues don't occur with windows.
2. The sound seems to have problems at times. There is some information in the Ubuntu Acer One article that talks a little about alsa and getting it working using Ubuntu 8.04 which leads me to believe this is also a driver/alsa issue. I still have issues using external headphones and getting the microphone (internal/external) hasn't worked out for me at all. When I plug in external headphones I still get sound out of both the speakers and the headphones.
The microphone issue is annoying and makes it impossible to use skype.
Aside from the issues mentioned above I am really happy with my Aspire One. I am a regular user of linux and also own a few macs. I prefer the One on the go since it is so portable and compact. I should have avoided the black one though as it shows up fingerprints like mad. I also upgraded from the 512MB of ram to 1.5GB by adding a 1GB stick.
I am confident that the driver issues will iron out over time and eventually everything will work nicely.
Edited 2008-10-31 18:09 UTC
Member since:2006-01-03
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspire_One
"Users have issues with the wireless connection dropping out intermittently[...]The fix is to disable power save mode via the Device Manager in Windows XP." Maybe Ubuntu has this option?
Might also want to try latest firmware / BIOS:
http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/notebook/as_one_150.html
Member since:
2007-05-15
I like the Sylvania Netbook better. The one I saw already comes with Ubuntu and has a 80GB hard drive. All for less $ than the Acer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qYkgxCjqow
Member since:2006-01-03
Where's the right shift key on the Sylvania G Meso?
http://eeepcs.ru/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/sylvananotebook-big.jpg
Another netbook besides the Aspire One that has a good key layout is the Samsung NC10 (Blue is NC10-14GB; White is NC10-14GW)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22046787@N03/2869388555/in/set-7215760...
Member since:2007-05-15
Member since:
2008-11-01
After a long fuss about the 3G module on Acer Aspire One, in Singapore about 2 weeks ago, some mobile Telco launched netbook with 3G feature built in.
* SingTel launched eeePC901
* MobileOne launched Dell Inspiron Mini 9
* StarHub going to launch Dell Inspiron Mini 9
Of course, with a subsidized price under contract.
With those, other type of netbook suddenly become a boring subject 
Member since:2005-08-02
Member since:
2008-10-31
Just noticed this morning while going through my rss feeds.
http://woot.com has the Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and 512MB of ram for $289.99 with $5 shipping. I believe this is one of the better (if not the best at the moment) for this model.
Edited 2008-11-01 12:13 UTC
Member since:
2007-07-03
The Aspire One is the one of the nicest netbooks around. Somehow the screen is done right withour one need to strain too much to look at it
You may also run XP software without reinstalling XP by using rdesktop and ThinServer
http://www.rdesktop.org
http://www.aikotech.com/thinserver.htm