The Acer Aspire one, Notebook PC, is it right for you?

Hey All,

I purchased an Acer Aspire One notebook last fall, as I was traveling to Northern Alberta to work in the Oil Patch, and needed a small compact laptop. The Acer Aspire One fit just that bill.

It is relatively small, with a screen dimension of just 8.9", and an overall dimension of 2.79cm Height x 24.89cm Width x 17.02cm Depth, and weighing just 2.4 pounds, it makes it an ideal travel laptop.

It runs on an Intel Atom Processor, with a 1.6GHz processor speed. Making it more than fast enough for all of my needs. It boasts a 160GB Hard Drive, and 1GB of memory.

It does how ever lack a DVD Drive, so the Acer Aspire One is well equipped with ports; three USB, plus VGA, Ethernet, headphone, and microphone jacks surround the system. Acer includes a 5-in-1 card reader (for transferring photos, music, and other files) on the right side of the unit, and an additional SD Card slot on the left.

Physically, the Aspire One is very similar to the slightly larger, pricier 10-inch MSI Wind, with a reasonably large keyboard that's much easier to use than the tiny almost smartphone-like keys found on the Asus Eee PC 901 or the Sylvania G Netbook. This is because the Aspire is wider than the Asus, and is a few ounces lighter. This is due to only having a small 3-cell battery. It includes a dedicated page-up and page-down keys, which are especially useful on devices with smaller screens that require lots of scrolling to get through long Web pages.

The touch pad is wide, but not very deep, similar to the one found on the HP 2133 Mini-Note. It's reasonably easy to use, at least as far as the small touch pads on Netbooks go. The mouse buttons are positioned to the left and right of the touch pad--not below it--which I personally do not care for, and find it somewhat difficult to get used to due to its small size.

The 8.9-inch wide-screen LCD offers a 1,024x600-pixel resolution, similar to other 9- and 10-inch Netbooks, such as the MSI Wind. It is wide enough to display most Web pages correctly.

Software includes Windows XP Home (with Service Pack 3),including several Windows staples such as McAfee Internet Security Suite, Microsoft Office 2007 (60-day trial), Windows Media Player, and Outlook Express 6.

Overall the Acer Aspire One is a well rounded, user friendly netbook. It is definately not a replacement for a full sized computer system, but is rather a compliment, or shall we say " a little brother" to.

Cheers for now,

dokken2007