GENERAL DAY-TO-DAY USE
I have been using this computer as my personal home computer for 3 months as of this review. I purchased a slightly different version from this one - mine has the 3-cell battery and 2GB of memory. I have since upgraded the battery to a 9 cell battery and get 8 hours of use per charge, which is very similar to this version of the Acer Aspire One 11.6". The product featured on this page only comes with 1 GB of memory. I highly recommend upgrading to 2 GB of memory. This is extremely important if you want to use multiple applications. It seems Acer wants to keep the price point at around $300-$350, so you either get 2 GB of RAM or the extended battery, but not both. You need both for the computer to be truly serviceable.
Overall, I find the computer to handle work applications very well. I usually have Firefox open with my Google Calendar and gMail, in addition to MS Word, Excel, and another application such as Adobe Lightroom, or PowerPoint. Like most people, I do a lot of multi-tasking. This computer does not have trouble managing all of this at the same time and it rarely bogs down. I love the small size from a portability perspective, and the 9 cell battery (this one comes with an 8 cell) provides a good grip to hold onto when carrying it around. I don't do any video editing, gaming, or high performance application use on this laptop.
SCREEN SIZE
If your considering whether to go with the 10" screen version or the 11.6" screen version, the difference between the two is fairly significant. My wife has the Aspire One 10" version, so I've been able to compare the two side by side. Instead of a 1024x768 screen resolution, you get 1366x768 with the 11.6" version, which basically gives you more room on the sides of the screen. This is great for allowing you to increase the zoom from ~80% to 125% of your document in MS Word, which makes the font appear much larger as you're working on your document. You won't have to scroll left and right to see the whole document at this expanded zoom level. My eyes aren't great, so this is very helpful for me. If you're worried about the screen on this computer being too small, the extra room on the sides actually makes a big difference. You can also see more of web site pages, which are noticeably limited in visibility on the 10" version but less so on the 11.6" netbook.
MOUSE TOUCH PAD
The mousepad is a little fussy and will often cause unwanted screen scrolling if you touch the pad the wrong way when trying to move the cursor. This is because mouse pad employs a circular motion with your finger to scroll, and it often misinterprets attempts to simply move the cursor as a command to scroll, which puts the user somewhere near the top or bottom of the page. I still haven't really gotten used to this. It would be nice if you could get rid of this effect and limit the use of the mousepad to moving of the cursor only. This would fix the problem, but you can't change the setting to limit the mousepad functionality in the Control Panel, at least I haven't been able to figure out how to do this. An external mouse could also fix the problem, but part of the beauty of a netbook is the portability, and I don't want to have to carry an external mouse around with me. Most of the time I use my netbook sitting in my lap where it would be impossible to use an external mouse anyway. If you use the mousepad, you will just have to get used to this scrolling feature and put up with the occasional unwanted scrolling.
VIDEO
As most others have noted in their reviews of this netbook, the 1.3 GHz Atom dual core processor and integrated graphics chip do not have sufficient power to view YouTube video. I have found this improves significantly with Windows 7 (see below). I have not tried to play DVDs on this laptop using an external CD/DVD drive, so no comment on how well this works.
OTHER OPERATING SYSTEM EXPERIENCE
BOTTOM LINE - Windows 7 is the best OS for this Laptop, but only by a nose over Vista
My laptop came pre-installed with Windows Vista (purchased July of 2009). I like playing with operating systems and thought it would be fun to try loading the following operating systems to see which one works best on this netbook:
a. LINUX Ubuntu / Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10
b. Windows XP Home Edition SP2
c. Windows Vista Homee Edition SP2
d. Windows Vista Dark Edition
e. Windows 7
In order to install other operating systems, you will need an external CD/DVD Drive that plugs in via USB and/or you will need a flash thumb drive with at least a 4-8 GB of space. The flash drive comes in handy if you want to install Linux, where the packages often come in flash-bootable formats. The BIOS on this netbook can be set to boot from the USB CD/DVD drive or from a USB flash drive by pressing F2 during boot to bring up the system BIOS menu and making the changes in the BIOS application directly - this is standard for nearly all computers.
WARNING #1: If you're not familiar with your system BIOS, please get a knowledgeable person to help you in making these changes. If you accidentally change the wrong thing, you may prevent your computer from booting altogether.
WARNING #2: The standard factory installed image comes with an application to create back-up bootable restore disks on CD or DVD. Make the DVD disks if you can; far fewer disks to create. Options include a full system recovery set of disks to restore the laptop to its original configuration plus a set of disks with the Windows Vista drivers and installed software. CREATE THESE DISKS BEFORE INSTALLING ANY OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS. If you don't, you won't be able to restore your computer to the factory install. There is no partition on the computer to restore the computer to factory installed settings and image - so you must create the disks!!!
LINUX (Ubuntu Standard / Ubuntu Netbook Remix v9.10) RATING: 2/10 BAD
I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products, so I've been carefully watching the Linux community to see when it will be ready for prime time for use on a home computer. Open Office from Sun provides a fantastic alternative to Microsoft Office series of products, and it runs on all platforms (Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). There are also many great distributions of Linux out there to choose from that are entirely free (the correct terminology is "open source")!!! I have had some success using and experimenting with the Ubuntu distribution of Linux on one of my home desktops, so I thought I would give it a try on this netbook to see how well it works.
I'm not an expert on Linux and this was my third foray into loading and using Ubuntu on a computer, but my first in loading Ubuntu on a laptop/netbook. I tried loading the standard Linux Ubuntu distribution, but it didn't turn out very well. I couldn't get a lot the hardware to work, such as the Wi-Fi and sound drivers. The Ubuntu Netbook Remix is optimized for an earlier version of the Acer AspireOne netbook, and it fixed most of these problems, but I was not able to get the hardware Wi-Fi on/off switch to work, but this is not a big deal. There is a software indicator on the desktop that you can use to turn the wi-fi function on/off.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes with a special configuration that displays commonly used elements of the operating system represented by icons on the desktop. The problem with this version (Ubuntu Netbook Remix v9.10) is that each time you click on one of the icons, the laptop lags for about 5-10 seconds before it moves focus to the next icon. This seems like an eternity and is totally unacceptable in terms of performance. Fortunately, you can switch to the standard Ubuntu desktop and it eliminates this problem. I used Firefox for internet browsing, which comes standard with Ubuntu and it was very sluggish and unresponsive. I was amazed at the poor performance. I think this is due to the fact that the Linux driver for the graphics chip is not as good as the Vista graphics driver that comes standard with the netbook. Overall lag and multi-tasking is impossibly slow and feeels really sluggish, not sharp. I had carefully researched the appropriate packages to install to try and fix this problem, but nothing improved the performance. Last, I could not get my printer to work in Ubuntu. Most printer manufacturers don't produce Linux drivers for their printers, so you have to be careful which printer you use. If you're like me, you already have a printer and you're not looking to buy a new one. I have a Canon printer, and there are no Linux printer drivers for Canon printers - period. Overall, Ubuntu was a failure for me with this laptop. It was too slow and I couldn't print - these are show stoppers for me. Please comment on my review if you are able to get it working better than I did because I'd love to eventually use Linux over Microsoft operating systems.
WINDOWS XP HOME EDITIION SP2 - RATING: 4/10 So-So to Poor
At first I thought XP would perform better than Vista, but again I was wrong. Vista is much better at memory management than XP is. After installing XP, I carefully installed all of the appropriate drivers. Be careful to install the correct mouse pad driver or it will be almost unusable. Again, performance was sluggish, though not nearly as bad as Linux Ubuntu Netbook Remix. For some reason, bringing up internet sites was very slow. Again, I used Firefox as I did with Linux Ubuntu for the sake of consistency. It doesn't come standard with XP, so I downloaded it. Trying to run multiple applications on this laptop using Windows XP is nearly impossible. Performance slows to a crawl and is basically unusable for a multi-tasker like me who likes to Alt-Tab across 4-6 applications while I'm working. Overall, XP was a failure for me with this laptop.
WINDOWS VISTA HOME EDITION SP2 - RATING 8/10 Very Good
As I mentioned above, this laptop comes preloaded with Windows Vista SP2 (as of my purchase date July 2009) and it is very apparent that the hardware drivers have been optimized for this operating system. Overall system responsiveness is quick and sharp. You can have 3-4 applications open with no noticeable performance hit. Once you have 5-6 open at the same time, you will notice some lag, but its manageable and depends on how much processor power you're using per application which is going to vary. All of the hardware works perfectly under Vista and you don't have to search for drivers. There is no way to create a basic Windows Vista basic install disk - the only way you can install Vista is from the full system recovery disk. This is bothersome if you want to install Vista but you want to create partitions for logical drives.
I have my own Vista install disk so I was able to create partitions and extra logical drives, but in the end I switched back to a single drive. This hard disk is only 250 GB in size and splitting it up into logical hard drives just didn't make any sense. Also, it is so easy to boot from USB drives that I am able to use Acronis image backup software to save my computer image at any given time from my external USB drive.
WINDOWS VISTA DARK EDITION - RATING: 8.1/10 Very Good
Vista Dark Edition is a special version of Vista that has some optimizations for managing files as well as some fun themes and backgrounds. Other than that, it's pretty much the same as Vista Home Edition. Overall, I found Vista Dark Edition to operate exactly the same as Vista Home Edition SP2 from a performance perspective. I just like the cool desktop backgrounds that come with Vista Dark Edition. The only reason for the extra 0.1 on the rating for this version is the cool desktop backgrounds, which many of you may not care about. If you don't care about the extra desktop backgrounds, then the adjusted rating for you would be 8/10, same as Vista Home Edition SP2.
WINDOWS 7 - RATING: 9/10 Excellent
I upgraded to Windows 7 from Vista Dark Edition. I installed Windows 7 directly from the Windows 7 DVD and it installed easily without any problems. It took about 3 hours to run, and I didn't have to intervene - I was able to just watch TV while it upgraded on its own. I've noticed that the laptop runs slightly faster, and that I can now view YouTube videos with minimal lag. This is probably attributable to the fact that Windows 7 is by far the best at managing memory use, which makes it actually better than Vista and XP on slow machines or laptops. I can still run 3-4 applications simultaneously; the navigation is very smooth going from app to app when using Alt-Tab. I am new to Windows 7 and understand there are better ways to navigate from window to window than using Alt-Tab, but old habits die hard. You also have the added benefit of being able to run YouTube videos without significant lag, which was just not possible when using Windows Vista. I highly recommend upgrading this laptop to Windows 7.
Get more detail about Acer Aspire One AO751h-1885 11.6-Inch White Netbook - 8 Hour Battery Life.
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