New Computer – Acer Aspire 1

After a HUGE amount of shopping around, I finally chose a notebook for myself. The decision was accelerated by the amount of time I’m spending in hotel rooms at the moment with not much to do so I pumped up my options, did some final checks and went for this. An AcerAspire One from Acer Direct .

This one is a refurbished unit Grade A2 (which means it’s effectively brand new with some damage to the box – The box is a bit tatty, nothing more – the laptop itself looks pristine.). It has a 16G SSD hard drive and 1Gig of RAM. I went for the small SSD drive because I realised I’d not need a huge amount of space for what I’m going to do with it (web/writing/email/photo editing/videos/music). Yes, music, photo’s and videos take up a lot of space but they’re very transient. Load them up, do stuff with them, remove them (with music being the possible exception).  Videos I’ll just watch once or twice and then delete, photos will be there only prior to sticking on the internet or back to my home PC terrabyte drive so space isn’t a big issue. Plus I have three USB drives. One 16G that I’ll use for videos (I typically accumulate videos on my home desktop and then move them onto this USB for watching), an 8G one that I use for general file transfer and a 4G encrypted stick that I use for very special things. I also have a 16G ipod which I wish could share it’s files when it’s connected but sadly not.

The other issue with the disk was that while SSD is much faster than a spinning platter and far more fault tolerant, it’s not nearly as quick as I wanted it to be. The online comunity suggests the way forwards is to replace the original SSD with a compact flash card and adaptor. Which I may do for a laugh.

Anyway. I can live with the space issue, (and there are many options available for internal expansion) . Battery life was a bit disappointing, 2.5 hours with the wireless enabled. I’m hoping this improves over time, it might need to go through a few discharge/recharge cycles before it reaches optimum performance.

The software was completely pants. The device came with Linpus Linux installed which I hated fromthe very start. Clearly desigend to allow idiots to use it it was far too restrictive for my geek fingers so I almost immediately downloaded an Ubuntu notebook remix image and dropped that on. Ten times better! It needed a bit of tweaking when it came to codecs for the video player but apart fromthat it worked fine. Sound, video, wireless, all the things that linux is typically slated for, all worked great!

It is brilliant! Battery life aside it’s very easy to carry around and while the keyboard is quite small for my engineer rapid fingers, I soon got used to keeping it tight. Well recommended.  140 quid from the link above. Get one.