Acer Aspire One: Review

Two weeks ago Tuesday I decided to purchase something I’ve been looking at for a long time: a netbook. Tiny, cheap, a little weak on performace, but perfect for doing web based stuff. After two weeks with the Acer Aspire One, I’d say for $400 this little machine is worth it. For reference, the main specs are: Windows XP, 1.6Ghz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 3-cell battery, 120GB hard drive, 8.9″ display.

Let me get the gripes out of the way first: The keyboard and trackpad are a little tough to get used to, which should be expected. The battery life could be a little better, but I could always buy a spare. And the WiFi at times is flaky, a problem that can be solved by restarting (which solves most problems in Windows). Other than that, I’ve had a very pleasent experience.

When I got this I was curious to see if I could manage with just this during the day while I was on campus. My day-to-day work includes web development and other programming, instant messanging, checking email, and listening to music. The last three can be taken care of on the web, using Meebo for IM, GMail for email, and Pandora for music. My concern was the software development stuff. Eclipse, my IDE of choice, is pretty heavy duty stuff. As it turns out, Eclipse takes a little while to start up and at times runs slower than desired, but it doesn’t hinder my productivity. I actually slightly underestimated the performance of this little machine.

However, there are some things to consider. As I mentioned, I run a lot of programs from the browser. I can do email, IM, music, Office (using GoogleDocs), and much more using just my web browser; and for that I use Google Chrome (which is by far the fastest browser I’ve used). So being concious of performance constraints, I was able to come up with some easy work-arounds and get more bang for my buck.

There are several limitations working on a netbook. For one, if you can’t work on a small display, this might not work for you. Also, I haven’t tried running more than Google Chrome and my development environment on it- but I don’t have a lot of faith. While my development environment is pretty demanding, I have a feeling once you read more than four major applications- IE or Firefox, AIM, Microsoft Word, and iTunes for example- you will see a big degradation in performance. That’s why my work around relies heavily on my broswer. If you don’t use a lot of web based resources, you might want to look into them before purchasing a netbook.

My conclusion is just what I thought it would be: this is great machine for web based stuff (and even some heavy lifting), but I could never make it my primary computer. I have several tools on my primary computer that just wouldn’t work on this netbook, and furthermore goes beyond what I think the netbook was created for. All-in-all, it was a very good purchase for me, and I think it would be a good purchase for someone looking for a cheap second machine.