Acer Aspire One Netbook Review (XP)

The Little Tugboat That Could (and Couldn’t)

No one ever said the Intel Atom is a blazing fast processor, but give it its due – for the power envelope it operates in, it’s not too bad. People like to claim victory at all levels for the VIA Nano, but when a 20W TDP chip beats out a 2.4W TDP one (N270, 1.6GHz), it’s hardly something to brag about.

After using Windows Vista on my desktop as well as Dell XPS M1330, I’ve become very accustomed to the interface and behavior that it felt weird booting into Windows XP. As a result, one of my first acts was to vLite a copy of Vista Business (32 bit) and installed it onto the machine. The vLite configuration cut the install size down to almost half the default, which is quite impressive. Even more so was the removal of many unnecessary services, improving performance and resource usage. With 1GB of RAM, the Aspire One needs some help to run Vista well.

Perhaps surprisingly, Vista performed very well and Aero was enabled after installing a more up-to-date version of the integrated Intel graphics drivers. With a couple applications running (browser, email client, and word processor), there were no slowdowns to be noticed. On the other hand, simply typing in Microsoft Word 2007 brought the CPU usage up to 40% on average. Still the experience was smooth and the CPU was more than capable of handling the simple multitasking and quite common usage pattern.

On the other hand, playing 720p videos isn’t feasible, not only because the display resolution doesn’t support it, but because frame rates are so slow that they become instantly out of sync with the audio. I’m not sure what I was expecting here exactly, but with many netbook users crooning about their HD-playing abilities, I was a bit put off. Perhaps a lower bit-rate encoding would have helped, but I certainly wouldn’t want to re-encode my media just to play it on the Aspire One.

Overall, it’s a pretty good experience, as long as you keep things in context. The machine is hardly going to be used as a media powerhouse or number crunching machine. As a web browsing, productivity tool, it’s sufficient.

A Big Racket

It’s one loud bugger. At default, the fan is at some medium speed almost all the time, and keeps the bottom of the net book at barely warm temperatures. The fan doesn’t even seem to move all that much air – the noise is mostly a whining, annoying, motorized buzz, not the sound of moving air.

As a corollary, heat is very much held at bay with the Aspire One. You could use this on your lap all you want and not fear for your legs… or other parts of your anatomy.

There are applications both for Windows and Linux that were created with this exact problem in mind. However, I noticed that shutting off the fan caused the device to heat up very quickly. While the fan doesn’t seem to move much air out of the laptop, it certainly keeps temperatures in check. Unfortunately, with the current fan system there only seem to be two settings: loud and louder. I wasn’t able to get the fan to spin slow enough to be quiet, but fast enough to keep temperatures at a manageable level.

As a netbook that will most certainly be used in all sorts of situations, the level of noise is disconcerting. The small size relative to other similar performance netbooks seems to be an issue for the thermal module.

Touchpad and Keyboard – Awkward and More Awkward

The touchpad and keyboard on the Aspire One can be described as awkward and more awkward, respectively. I’ve had my time with an Eee 700 and the keyboards are worlds apart. They keys are the Aspire One’s keyboard are vastly more useable. There is some flex throughout most of the keyboard, but under normal typing force, it has no effect on typing at all.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the actual key layout. With only the bilingual version available in Canada, there are several key differences from the English layout I’m used to both on my desktop and XPS M1330. These aren’t small differences either. They affect some of the most used keys, the left shift, enter and backspace keys. The Enter key is double height and shorter, the left shift is half size, with the other half being used for a slash, and the backspace is also significantly reduced in size. The three combine to a mighty mess of typing errors. I might have been able to get used to it, but with 80% or more of my computing time spent sitting in front of a standard layout keyboard, I just couldn’t get accustomed. I’m sure the smaller than standard key-size magnified the problem as well.

The touchpad is quite small vertically, but with a decent sensitivity setting, it’s manageable. On the other hand, the left and right clicks are a bit painful to use. While it’s easy to get around the left click button by enabling tap-to-click, right clicking can’t be avoided. Not only are the buttons the hard clicking type, they’re also extremely narrow. Although I can excuse Acer for the side-mounted buttons to allow for extra vertical touchpad space, they could have at least made the buttons less awkward to employ. But they didn’t.

As an aside, I tried out an HP Mini-Note as well while at BestBuy and noted its vastly superior keyboard, both in terms of size and layout. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other faults with that netbook.