It’s not often I write a hardware review but here I am writing you one on my latest toy… well you could almost call it that.
My recent purchase is something of a modern one, an Acer Aspire One. Acers take on the netbook craze following Asus with their eeePc and the MSI Wind.
To keep it brief, the “One” comes with Intels new Atom processor, 512mb ram, 8gb SSD, an 8.9″ screen and Linpus Linux OS. My first impression is that the unit is very light, it boots fast, once the initial updates were done everything has worked flawlessly. The downside is the outside being glossy, it has my finger prints all over it so it seems like something people are always going to be cleaning.
The media player codecs weren’t working though, but a quick lesson in using Terminal for Fedora and I had VLC in and a movie playing. While there is very little storage, there are 3 USB ports to accommodate USB drives, or an external drive. I already have a notebook drive I use on my main pc for back ups, and now are considering another external drive or spending the money on an SD card to extend the storage, the added bonus is the two SD card slots so one can be for permanent expanded storage.
The unit does run a little hot, but it’s not to bad. The screen is nice and bright, Firefox works with all the usual plugins I use. So far I’m very happy with the unit.
AspireOneUser.com has a lot of articles on the Aspire One and also forums with lots of how to guides for both Windows, Linux and Hardware bits and pieces to help you along the way, it’s a good strong, but small community for Aspire One users.
So far it’s great, I’ll post more on the Aspire One at another stage.