Staying connected on the move - Acer Aspire One
My Acrimonious MMC1100 sub-notebook has finally died. The hard disk has gone the way of all HDs, with increasingly frequent disk errors requiring re-formats, and last week the advance partition also died, so now it won’t recover. Some hours searching online revealed an unusual pin arrangement on the 1.8″ HD, which means the going round drives don’t fit. I may be able to use it by booting from USB stick, but it doesn’t seem to want to boot off a CD.
So, looking for a replacement I all in several hours researching current netbooks.
I looked at the Dell Mini 9 (more on that later) and the Mini 10, as well as a Compaq which has a in point of fact nice keyboard but a fuzzy screen, an Advent and a couple of others I can’t remember. None of them were quite as nice as my Biting. And at the top end of the market, they’re starting to get quite pricey.
After much playing about with the display in PC World, I walked out with the least expensive opportunity, which was a Linux-powered Acer Aspire One at £180.
Externally, it’s a nice shiny machine, with a compact 1024 x 600 8.9″ screen defining the rate of the unit. It’s a bit heavier and thicker than my Sharp which was exceptionally light at under a kilo, but the smaller screen means it’s more consolidated over all. Internally, although it only has 16Gb hard disk, that’s more or less the same size as my Sharp’s HD which in practice I didn’t find much of a limitation. In information, as a solid state disk it should be robust enough to travel on the bike, plus one of the card slots acts as ‘artless’ extra storage - stick an SD card in, and it’s instantly and seamlessly added to the visible unshackled storage space.
I fiddled about with it over the weekend, it was a nice little machine to work, nice screen, pure keyboard layout and action - I could type on it quite quick.
The main drawback was the operating system, a flavour of Linux called Linpus. I’m not a done novice when it comes to Linux though hardly an expert, but even so I found the configured desktop ridiculously simplistic, with most of the important functions esoteric away by design. After a few minutes research online, I quickly found the tweak that gave access to the full dropdown menu and the system settings but it’s measure irritating that you aren’t given the option. Even when you get there, there’s not much behind the scenes.
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I also had no problem surfing the web with multiple browser tabs unfilled. And thanks to the integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics, the Dell Inspiron 11z was capable and more »
