Acer Aspire One First Impressions

I grabbed an Acer Aspire One this weekend.  The Windows XP model was on sale at FutureShop for $299.




Here are some random first impressions:

  • The form factor is very cool.  Not too small but very light.
  • FutureShop (Canadian reseller) only sells models with bilingual (English or French) keyboards.
  • The Canadian models allow you to select XP in English or French.
  • The whole setup process takes less then an hour (didn't timed it).
  • The color choice I had was between sapphire blue and sapphire blue.
  • Sapphire blue is a fingerprint magnet.
  • The power supply is very tiny.
  • Deinstalled Office Student 2007 trial and Mcafee.
  • Installed Free AVG, Spyware Doctor and Picassa (both from Google Pack).
  • I had an old 5.25" external USB enclosure so I stuffed in there a DVD drive to install Office Ultimate 2007 and Visual Studio Team Suite.
  • Installed SQL Server Express 2008.
  • Some dialog boxes have a height of 600 pixels.
  • Copied some files to the netbook using an external 2.5" USB drive.
  • Wifi works without problems.
  • External VGA can output more then 1024x600 if the netbook screen is disabled.  The driver can go up 2048x1536 however I wouldn't dare go as high.  I tested it with an output of 1280x800.  Nice!
  • If you want to use it as a presentation machine, you must have a podium like setup where you see the output from an external monitor and the projector.
  • XP boots fast.
  • A fresh boot leaves me with 500MB free memory.  Shocking!
  • Visual Studio takes about 8 seconds to start.
I see me using it when:
  • Doing presentations that don't require a virtual machine or not CPU intense.
  • On a plane to watch a movie or work on a document or presentation.
  • As a photo viewer when I go see family and friends.
  • Bringing a laptop with me just in case.
  • Bringing a backup presentation machine.
  • On vacations to dump the daily pictures.

5 Comments

  • So Guy, for a low profile user, just email, word processing, photos and some websurfing at home?
    Do You think is OK?

    regards

  • Please write a review on the performance of visual studio 2008 on this machine.

  • I just bought an Acer Aspire One for the same purposes have listed above. I'm also trying to install Visual Studio Team Suite but it seems to always freeze up when it's trying to install what looks to be the .NET 3.5 Runtime.
    Did you see any of these issues when you installed it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  • I am ordering one as well, here are the uses I expect to get out of it:

    - light development with visual studio 2008 team suite
    - web surfing, gmail, facebook, etc
    - reading e-books (eg, chm and pdf files from alt.binaries.e-book.technical) in bed, on the couch, on the road, on the porch..
    - dumping images from my camera
    - super nintendo emulator (ZSNES + Roms + an XBOX 360 USB controller, works great!)
    - apple //e emulator
    - watch movies (dvd shrink to a usb drive, use an old copy of PowerDVD 5)
    - load street maps and use it on the road (don't have a gps unit)
    - bulky mp3 player :)

    what I love most is the small form factor, making it much more portable than my older Dell 600m laptop which has about the same power as this (my dell 600m is a centrino 2.0ghz, 1gb ram, 80gb hd, 1400x1050 display)

    the unit i am looking at claims to use a 6-cell battery and run 7+ hours on a full charge, that's nice!

  • how about the performance of Visual Studio 2008? is it worth it?

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