Acer Aspire One

I have hinted that I might buy one of these tiny, lightweight netbooks, and I have done just that. About 2 weeks ago I purchased an Acer Aspire One. It is tiny. It is lightweight. I paid $399 at Amazon. Although the ads suggest a price of $349, keep in mind that this is for a three cell battery. I purchased the model with a 6 cell battery, and this is listed at $399.

If you are going to buy a netbook be sure to read all of the fine print about its battery. This one lasts 5 or 6 hours, depending on what one does with it. If you power it up in the morning and put it in standby when it's not being used, the battery would probably last all day. This is a real boon for travelers, and that is one reason I bought it.

Another reason I bought it was that it was advertised as being 2 pounds 3 ounces (as I recall). The one I purchased with the 6 cell battery weighs in at 43 ounces on my food scale, and that's 2 pounds, 11 ounces, making it still a featherweight in my opinion.

It comes with the very familiar Windows XP and 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard disk drive. This is a well-configured machine. Its microprocessor is an Intel Atom 720 with a rated speed of 1.6GHz, not a speed demon by any measure, but adequate for most work.

The most significant feature of this machine is its 8.9" display. Believe me folks, this is small. I would not want to use this on a regular basis, but it suits my wife just fine. She has excellent vision and only uses light reading glasses when using the Acer. I would not recommend buying this machine for anyone until/unless you try one out at a store. Make sure you can live with the screen size.

Otherwise, it's a neat little machine. It was sluggish when it came out of the box with XP SP3, IE7, and McAfee. The first thing I did was to get rid of McAfee and installed AVG Free in its place. Next I installed Firefox and stopped using IE7. Now it performs much better. I haven't looked into this yet, but I understand its max memory capacity is 1.5GB, but the upgrade from its standard 1GB to that is not (supposedly) something the user can do. If I were ordering again, I'd try to order from someone who could install the extra memory first.

A friend asked me if I recommend Acer generally, and although this is my third Acer machine, I have reservations about recommending Acer. I bought my first and then second Acers as teaching tools for classes and as a challenge to myself to see if I could keep them running (they are cheaper). So far I have been successful, but keep in mind these are not my first choice machines for personal use. I still revert to my old IBM desktop as my main machine. For my customers I mostly recommend Dell - for their support.

The Acer Aspire One