Acer One Netbook

My wife, Bella has been such a trooper.... it seems like every new toy we get is mine.   I went out of town for a week recently and it became obvious she needed her own machine when we received a call from a customer and she had to respond and didn't have a machine to use.  We looked around at the different netbooks available through the local stores and again decided the Acer was the one to get.  I have been so pleased with my Acer One that it wasn't hard to choose after looking at the different brands I could get my hands on.  Bella wanted Windows XP instead of Windows 7 so we choose the AOD250-1424.

 

The specifications for the AOD250-1424 are: Windows® XP Home Edition; SP3 version; Intel® Atom™ Processor N280 [512KB L2 cache, 1.66GHz, 667MHz FSB]; 1GB DDR2 667 SDRAM; 160GB hard drive, multi-in-one card reader; 10.1" WSVGA (1024 x 600) TFT display, Acer® CrystalBrite Technology; Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950; 802.11b/g WLAN, 10/100 LAN, webcam; diamond black chassis; 5800mAh six-cell battery; one-year limited warranty

The most noticeable difference between hers and mine is the size.  Mine is the 8.9" model and hers has a 10.1" display which turns out to be around 1" wider and 1/2" taller screen size.  The second thing that I noticed is her's weighs more.  With the six cell battery, it weights 2.95 lbs while mine has a 3 cell battery and weighs 2.19 lbs.  The extra weight might be worth the extra 4 hours of use.  I've been thinking about getting a six-cell battery for my machine.

I was interested in comparing the boot-up time.  Her's has a 160GB hard drive in it and mine has a 8GB SSD.  Her's also has Windows XP on it and mine runs Linux Mint.  Pressing the power button on both machines at the same time hers brought up the desktop at around 45 seconds, just a few seconds before my login screen came up.  Her processor is a little faster at 1.66 GHz while mine is 1.6 GHz and her front side bus is faster at 667 MHz compared to my 533 MHz.  I think the biggest thing that slows my machine down is the SSD drive.

Anyway, she is tickled with it and that is what really matters.  Her first comment though was that she wished it had multiple desktops like Linux has.  There is a desktop manager PowerToy for XP that gives 4 desktops.  I played with it a little a few years ago and wasn't real impressed with it, but I installed it on hers and will see if she likes it or not.

By the way, the one thing I don't like about her new Acer is it requires an external CDRW to create a restore CD.  It would be nice if Acer would give the option to create ISO images that could be transfered to another machine to burn the Recovery CDs.