Aspire One

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rednose66 wrote: »

All depends on what you want. If you want a near instantaneous boot up then go for the 8gig drive. The small drives are SSD drives which dont contain mechanical parts and boot lightning fast in comparison to the 20 odd seconds it takes for a hard drive to boot.

I think you'll find that in this situation - the "fast boot" is not down to the media type you're booting from - (a review on BBC/Click confirmed that there was not a lightning fast improvement, but (fair to say) a slight improvement on boot-up times/speeds) - in this case - it's the difference between the Linus and Windows O/S's.

Windows is well known for being a rather "heavy" o/s (compared to Linux). Even when booting WinXP from a SSD/USB mem stick, compared to Linux on an HDD - Linux wins !!

seth

Thanks OP, the deal is about average.

I got the Asda deal with the blue 160 model. It is fast, boots in 11s from cold, with a google homepage and wifi connection in <14s from switch on. Someone at work has a SSD model of the Acer with XP and it takes 43s to 55s to boot.

Video is excellent (LED back lit) ounce you enable Xvid support! Software was a bit dated, I've upgraded to Firefox latest and OpenOffice 3.

Battery life is good for such a low spec battery

Great keyboard.

Remember that 10" and 11" models are available (11" due in June) so these units are old stock from December 2008 / Jan 2009.

There is a good choice of OS from the Linspire, Ubuntu and Windows, and MAC OS.

Kids and Mrs seem happy with the Linspire offering that the units shipped with.

smartie12

Bought my son an Acer - nothing but trouble

Hubby also has one and he would not get one again. He can't close it:mad:

I would say get one if you don't want it to last long or spend a bit more money and get something else;)

kimmy393

I have an acer netbook and think it great - the only prob is that battery life

SurfBowlSC

We bought the 16GB model with XP from Comet at the weekend for £199.99
We toyed over and over with getting one, as our existing Compaq was getting slower and slower. I download a lot, but my wife wanted something with wireless and does nothing but internet.
In the end we HAD to buy as she managed to break it in a moment of temper.

Could have spent £280 on a proper laptop with 160GB, CD/DVD Re-writer etc. but for what we need it didn't make much sense to over-spend.
The 16GB is perfect for us as we have a 500GB external media player drive which everything is stored on.

So far the only quibble is that the wireless can be a bit temperamental, but the wife's relatively happy that she doesn't have to sit in one place to use it!

We may now return it though as a mate at work has fixed our existing laptop and it's working 10 times faster than it ever did.....

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SurfBowlSC wrote: »

So far the only quibble is that the wireless can be a bit temperamental, but the wife's relatively happy that she doesn't have to sit in one place to use it!

You might find that changing the channel setting on your wireless router may fix the problem with wireless coverage ....

FYI - there are 13 channels for 2.4Mhz wireless that opperate in the UK, the frequency is shared with bluetooth devices, other peoples wi-fi, some alarms, car key-fobs, video senders etc .... these frequencies can become congested - by changing the channel your router works on - you can potentially move to a "cleaner" channel and hence increase your routers range, hence the reliablity of your devices connection.

If you know what you're doing you might want to try a free scanning tool that shows you channels in use by eEye.

anewman

Linux is great once you get used to it. Only thing is you can't run your windows software and games (although there are plenty of good free games and software available for linux). I want to get hold of one of these things at some point, but will wait for prices to come down and specs to improve a little.

PJB

IGNORE THIS, SEE THIS:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1645933