Netbook Review
Dave
The internal wireless card on my laptop bit the dust and considering the thing is close to four years old, I decided to just buy a new laptop. I looked around and with the financial slump we are all going through, decided that $350 is a pretty good deal for the little Acer Aspire One Netbook. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, I can give my unbiased, and of course unopinionated, view of this little piece of crap! Just kidding, I actually like it.
Just to set the record straight, this is the larger of the many Netbooks out there, with an 11.6″ LCD screen and kind of a full keyboard. The keyboard is big enough to type fairly comfortably, although some keys, like the ‘Home’ and ‘End’ key, which I use more often than I would have guessed, are incorporated with the ‘Pg Up’ and ‘Pg Down’ keys so you have to hit the ‘FN’ key simultaneously to use them. I’m not sure why they didn’t reverse that. I seldom, to never, use the ‘Pg Up’ and ‘Pg Down’ keys.
All in all though, I’m pretty happy with it. It came with XP, which I like much more than Vista. I’ve loaded a lot of high end software on it (Office 2007, Adobe CS, AutoCAD) and they all run just fine. I would be interested to see how one works with MobLin on it, since it is using the Intel Atom processor. Maybe after I’ve had it long enough to wear off that “New Laptop Smell”, I’ll blast it and load Moblin on it.
The downside… it is small. Its just fine for writing blogs, checking mail and doing some light work on but I certainly wouldn’t want to write a book with it. I can’t imagine what the smaller 6″-8″ models are like. I think typing on my iPhone would be comparable although I haven’t tried one out. If anyone has, let me know what you think! I imagine that after some practice… I mean even my big fat thumbs are getting pretty quick on my iPhone 
Til Next Time!
db
