[sclug] Acer Aspire One

[Scott Rixon]

Hi all,

Got my hands back on the Acer Aspire One this week and thought I'd give 
you my first impressions. (If anyone cares??)

If you haven't seen of these then I think you will be impressed at first 
look. The screen is really nice, bright, clear, it looks amazing. It 
closes nicely and generally feels very well made. I would never normally 
recommend something with an Acer logo on to anyone but this feels the part.

Someone before me had tried to install XP on it! They had spend over 3 
hours just trying to install service pack 3. It took15mins to boot and 
was hardly usable.

I took the opportunity to try Ubuntu on it. It installed fine but for me 
took too long to boot. So I swapped back to the Acer tweaked OS 
'Linpus'. This boots in 15s, which sell this to me. It's great to click 
the power button and see the OS appear almost immediately. It means you 
don't mind shutting it down as it comes back on so fast. Battery life is 
running at just over 3 hours with normal use and Wi-Fi always on, a 
little less than I would like..

I thought the standard mail app was slightly hopeless.. I configured it 
for my IMAP server and it download a copy of the mail. No access to any 
of my folders etc :(

I have now installed Thunderbird and a small screen theme and I am very 
happy. Even found out how to tweak the launch to add the icon.

So far so good. I agree that 3G would be a good addition and I 
understand that it's not far away but other than that it's a great 
little device for under ?200.

Scott