Acer Aspire One

[Phil.]

After the untimely death of my laptop i was thinking of getting a netbook as a replacement. The specs on the better acer aspire one's seem quite good and the price isn't bad but as far as general usage goes i'm concerned about one thing in particular, how well it handles flash video? If anyone has/knows about them i'd like to hear more about your experiences with it.

Also i plan on putting ubuntu or xp on it, which ever performs best.

Also was surprised to see that PC world's price is pretty good on these:
Clicky

Found cheaper but i have ordered from these in the past and it took a while to get here as it was shipped from france and need it fairly soon.

[Itchy]

The acer has several problems (which it shares with other net books like that), (I have an EE901).

The acer one is particularly bad as it has a tiny battery , not such an issue if you aren't travelling about.. + £30 if a battery and to match the EE you need some more ram or someting things might have changed. EE has same CPU and 1gig ram ie similar spec but it runs Xandros , I changed to unbuntu and the battery life went down by 30% so I changed it back to Xandros and tweaked it massively.

On my EE youtube is ok , and news site videos are also ok , but you try someting like redtube and the sound isn't sync'd or it is choppy unless you download the whole thing, xp doesn't have such problems accoridng to a tech I know.

Heh my EE used to run horrendously once but then I realised I had 4 underclocking programs running at the same time , by my dell 2400 note book gives it a run for its money.

EDIT this was benchmarked by ME in Mongkok super PC centre the bloke let me take the acer and the EE and have a go for an afternoon , and I tried it on some WIFI hot spots which are way faster than the wireless card in the EE and Asus's upper limits so it wasn't a poor connection.
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Spain 2008France 2007Big one 2009 We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. In the end, your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it is worth watching.

[Serendipity]

I installed XP Pro onto what was originally a Linux flavoured Aspire One for a work colleague the other week. Took a while to sort out all the drivers as a couple were missing from the Acer site, but all worked out well in the end. I seem to remember that it was the wired LAN driver that was fecked. Found a working driver on the chip manufacturer’s site in the end.

Anyway it was for my colleague’s teenage niece so I made sure that all the basics were loaded: iTunes, Java, Flash etc as well as chucking on Office and a few other apps that I would consider “essential”.

Flash seemed to run ok on You Tube, but I confess that I didn’t try any other flash sites. Although my four year old son did spend quite a while playing flash games on the cbeebies site and they performed well enough.

Overall I was quite impressed with the performance, but bear in mind that my expectations were really low. I expected it to be a dog and found myself vaguely tempted to buy one by the time I’d finished with it.

It was an A150L model with the ubiquitous Atom CPU, 1GB ram, 120GB HDD and Intel chipset. My friend picked it up for £205 apparently. Looked quite classy in the blue and people at work thought it was some sort of high end Vaio or something.

If you can find one with the 1GB ram I’d recommend that over the 512mb one.

My only gripe (apart from the fact of it being so fecking small) is the weird position of the mouse buttons either side of the trackpad. I never tested the battery life properly, but definitely had it running away from the mains for over two hours. If that seems a bit short you could always pick up a spare battery.

Cheers.
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2007 CBF1000 & 2016 CBF1000F - Commuter heaven | 1994 CBR600FR - Awaiting defibrillation

[The Tot]

Mate,

That's the exact Laptop that i have. I got it from PC world for that price because it was DIRT cheap! So what if it has 512mb ram!

You can upgrade RAM from www.crucial.com/uk - i've always used crucial units on my PC when it came to upgrading. It's pretty simple and it's only £9 for an extra GB of ram

https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtURqz4GSSM
https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o0RzomSrM5Y

I used these two guides to install the Ram on the aspire one because it requires some disassembly of the chassis. You just follow the dude's prcedure and it'll be fine. All you need is a small precision screwdriver (philips) and a credit card and the job's a good-un. Remember to handle the circutery with care and don't try to force or pry. The connection cables are very fragile and very small, so remember to undo them and reconnect when you disassemble. Other than that, the guide's idiotproof. Sod paying an extra £20 to get the ram.

There's also some guides out there that help you make a bootable USB drive and create an unattended installation copy of XP .

I've used this guide here

https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=o0RzomSrM5Y where it's pretty much explanitory, just make sure you go into the bios and change your boot priority, ensuring that USB is selected and that it stays the same for the duration of the XP installation and setup process. Once it works, revert the boot setup to HDD as primary.

So for the purchase price of £199, i've done the following upgrades:

£50 - upgraded 6600mah battery - good for 6 hours web surfing and typing in lectures. It can be extended to 7 hours if you turn off the volume and wlan. I've yet to do an idle battery run down test, but 7 hours is more than enough to have your laptop at lectures for.

£ FREE - XP SP2 install... I won't go into much detail regarding this - as far as i know it's a legitimate and registered copy . As simplistic as the linpus GUI interface is, i'd want to be able to get drivers for the damn thing and have commonality with my main Asus A8J laptop. I regard my netbook as a uni tool so it needs to be versatile and flexible. If you want drivers for XP, i'll be more than happy to load them up - i can't remember the forum where i've downloaded them from, but acer's website was pants

£9 - 1gb ram .. makes all the difference when browsing and using photoshop and CAD .

So, at the moment, i'm using an nlited version of XP with a lot of unnecessary crap cut out of it (accessibility tools, games etc) but i've got Office 2007, Photoshop CS2, Solid Edge V18 as my primary uni tools as well as some other uni software and i can say it does it without a hitch. Web browsing with the extra gb of ram makes it useful (1.5gb total) and flawless.

Dare I say it, but i've managed to plug my line 6 tone port into it and i'm using it as a portable guitar interface!!!

120gb is ample so i've split the HDD into a near enough 20:90 gb split (formats down to 112gb so i've got 2 partiitions one for software, the other for documents and music). Surprisingly, boot time is a helluva lot quicker than my Asus A8JS which was a pretty capable laptop.

Common gripes - poor battery life as standard, no drivers can be found for linpus. Trackpad can be a bit bizarre to begin with, but i double tap the pad to open stuff. The RHS has a scroll wheel function as does the lower portion. Needless to say, the pad is the same size as my mate's NC10, it's just that their buttons are below it.

Benefits - awesome keyboard makes touch typing a cinch! £199 is a good price to pay for the basic system if you've got a spare copy of xp lying about as well as £9 to upgrade the ram. The battery boost from the 3 cell 2200mah to the 6 cell 6600mah is DEFINITELY worth it. Battery may look bulky, but it gives the laptop some balls! Bulky battery allows you to hold it in your left hand with ease as you type with your right! It also prevents the screen from hyper-extending too.

Anyway, here are some pics:

https://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh313/Titot01/DSCF1897.jpg

Size Comparison with K800i phone and original battery

https://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh313/Titot01/DSCF1898.jpg

Original Battery VS 6600 mah . The bulkier battery tilts the laptop making it have much better ergonomics for typing. It also helps with cooling by allowing air to flow through.

https://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh313/Titot01/DSCF1899.jpg

Running XP with Vista Inspirat for aero eyecandy

https://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh313/Titot01/DSCF1901.jpg

Size comparison with Samsung pebl 20" HDTV and Asus A8JS 14" laptop

https://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh313/Titot01/DSCF1903.jpg

https://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh313/Titot01/DSCF1904.jpg

Hefty battery

Anyway, any help questions or queries, PM me. My housemate also has an NC10 so PM me if you need any help with that too.
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The Tot 2019 Z1000SX - 2007 R1
Never argue with autism

[CaNsA]

As ive mentioned it in every other "thinking about a netbook" thread ill say the same in here.

Bought the missus an Acer Aspire One, 8gb ssd, 512mb ram. She loves it.
No problems, battery life is good (itchy is talking bollox)
It has winxp on it, easy to install from a usb pendrive
Brilliant connectivity
Great screen, nice, sharp, clear

For under 200 quid you cant get cheaper. Its brill for web browsing and normal stuff like word processing etc.

I installed a load of apps from PortableApps.com which have stuff like open office (better than MSoffice) Firefox, VLCPortable and loads more.
And as they havent got the shit that goes with the normal installs they take up less space.

The Acer Aspire One is a cracking netbook that can most of the stuff a standard laptop can do.

Seen this on the register
https://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/16/review_netbook_toshiba_nb100/
£286 (Windows XP,120GB HDD) £252 (Ubuntu Linux, 80GB HDD)
Get the linux one and put xp on it your self



Peace

[iooi]

FIL got one from currys.
Advent 4213 but it came with XP in a sealed packet as well as installed.

Intel Atom N270Processor - Energy efficient
(1.6GHz, 533MHz FSB, 512MB cache)
Genuine Windows(R) XP Home
Memory & storage - 1GB Memory & 160GB HDD
Portable - 10.2" Widescreen Display & 1.4KG
Looks like they have upped the price by £50 now as its £279....

He was looking at the cheaper linux one's but i managed to open his wallet a bit more and get the above, he only paid £229.
Means i won't have to spend as long messing around with it for him.

Nice little devices for surfing, but don't half struggle with basic stuff like any kind of pic editing..... And that includes rotating pics, which are very slow.
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Just because my bike was A DIVVY, does not mean i am......

[Phil.]

Thanks for the indepth advice there Titz,

As it turned out i went to buy an acer one the other day only for them not to have one in stock. But while there the advent 4211 caught my eye, which is just a re-branded msi wind.

Anyhow bought one of them for around 235. Put Linux mint on it as a partition but still need to do some messing with nlight to make sure i can restore xp, then i can delete that useless tech guys partition. Almost everything is working on mint except for the built in mic. So untill that's fixed i will have to keep xp around for skype.

I must look into upgrading the ram on this, £9 seems well worth it..In fact after writing that i went to see what it could take and found and ordered 1gb for 9.50

[NSR Mick]

[CaNsA]

[The Tot]

Probably depended on how you first charged your battery. I just hooked it up and powered it up straight away rather than leave it connected to the mains. Suffice to say, with wlan on and screen brightness minimised, i got 2:30hrs on the standard 3 cell battery.

WLAN does kill a lot of battery though.

Much of the reason why i went to XP was that i NEEDED skype! That and the other software i wanted to install - open office is used on my housemate's NC10, BUT it doesn't seem to like the documents which are subsequently opened on word2007; which is the standard at uni, and it's also what my main laptop has... i don't particularly like it, but parts commonality helps to stop conflicts.
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The Tot 2019 Z1000SX - 2007 R1
Never argue with autism

[CaNsA]

For the WLAN i have it set to max power save, and i use wpa2-aes which is less hassle for the CPU to play with.

Screen brightness is set to one above minimum.

When i 1st got it i let the battery run completely flat then charged it up fully while powered off.

HTH

CaNsA

[panrider_uk]

For info ebuyer also sell the HP 2133 "mini-note" for £190

1Gb RAM, 120Gb Hard disk

Mark
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Current bikes: Honda ST1100 Pan European. Moto Guzzi V85 TT Travel

[giarc]

Asda are selling one model of the aspire for £150. There is a massive thread on hotukdeals about it:

https://www.hotukdeals.com/item/318205/acer-aspire-one-aoa150-ab-netbook-w/

My girlfriend uses one, as she commutes to uni. It's nice and light, and looks smart too. I would take a look around as there are some major brands now selling similar - but the price may be higher for one of them?

[Seb]

[Zimbo]

[Kickstart]

Hi

We have had a EEEPC for about a year now. Fairly low spec early one but it does the job nicely. Battery life is not bad really.

Noticed that the new EEEPCs have far better keyboards.

All the best

Keith
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[The Tot]

Far better keyboards keith . Even the Eee 900/901 is appaling by the standards of the aspire one, let alone the NC10! I tried touchtyping with it, and it wsa having none of it! Granted, the 901 has a 6 cell batt as standard. AFAIK, the eee's are just asus branded and made by one of their subsidiaries. Still, if it weren't for the Eee700's, we won't be having the netbooks that we're having now; they were the pioneers! I can see a huge shift in laptop use ... for 80% of tasks these days, a netbook will do them without much hesitation. I'm going to try if the aspire one is going to cut it with adobe audition/cool edit pro, because if it does, then i can use it as a portable music production tool too - quaility won't be good but it'll be good enough for spontaneous sessions. The integrated intel card still manages to run solid edge without much issue though!
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The Tot 2019 Z1000SX - 2007 R1
Never argue with autism

[Kickstart]

Hi

One we have is a 701 I think. Works well but the keyboard is pretty nasty.

All the best

Keith
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing