I’ve been interested in netbooks since last autumn. I didn’t buy one at the time because I wound up getting my mitts on a T-Mobile G1 smartphone. Last week I pulled the trigger — I got the Acer Aspire One.

For me, it was an impulse purchase. I stopped into my local Micro Center (aka Valhalla) ostensibly to look at the Lenovo S10. I swear I was just gonna look. Then I saw the Aspire for $279 and thought, “What the heck. If it croaks after 6 months I’m not out that much money.” My wife was like, “$279 is nothing if it makes you shut up about netbooks.” So, boom, the deal was done.

Pros:

• It’s soooooo light — under 2.5 pounds — less than half the weight of my office laptop. And the power brick is light, too.

• It’s got 1GB of RAM and a 160 GB drive — plenty of capacity for what I want it to do.

• No probs connecting wifi at home, Jenkins, or at Drexel.

• Ditto for powering 2 different LCD projectors. (If it wasn’t able to do that, it would have been a deal-buster. I’d have had to return it to Micro Center and take a 15% hit on the restocking fee. Whew!)

Cons:

• No LCD drive, so I can’t play DVDs or CDs. (I can buy a USB drive for like $65 if I want/need to, say, reinstall Windows.)

• Some reviewers say the fan’s noisy. I can hear it when it kicks in, but it’s not bad.

• The battery life is short — around 3 hours. That’s still plenty to get me through a class at Drexel or a presentation at a conference.

• My big beef? The left- and right-buttons on the mousepad sound/feel tinny and cheap. I don’t think they’ll break any time soon, but if I was a betting man, I’d put my money on them failing first.

Final note:

The Acer’s running Windows XP. I decided to go without antivirus (but did turn on the Windows firewall), ’cause I’m just sooo tired of having it slow me down. I decided to stick exclusively with Google Chrome because it’s way safer than IE and even Firefox. We’ll see how it goes.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on May 19, 2009 - 10:47 am

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