Acer Aspire One

 

The Acer Aspire One is a netbook computer that will get the job done for most of us who need to carry an Internet-capable device around, but dread those tiny keyboards found on most smartphones, pdas and pocket computers. I appologize in advance for my long absence. I had a hiccup in the course of trying to live a century or more. I wanted to see what it was like to live on five dollars per week. It is doable, but you have to set a budget for yourself and really stick to it or you'll find that five dollars is gone in a single purchase.

In my absence from this blog, I found that you can live on five dollars a week and that you become quite creative in the things that you eat and the activities that you engage in. For me, it was all about trying to stay connected to the online world while at the same time, trying to stay clean, warm, engaged with the offline world and keep up with the latest promotions (those that didn't require spending any money).

I managed to trade, barter and liquidate some things that were just collecting dust and purchased a new Acer Aspire One netbook. It's called a Netbook because it weighs about 2 1/2 pounds and you can do pretty much anything a regular laptop does with the exception of maybe hardcore gaming. It has an excellent screen resolution that measures just under 9-inches, a Windows XP Home Edition operating system and a keyboard that takes about a half hour or so, to get use to, at least for me. It comes with McCaffe Antivirus and firewall as a trial, but when the antivirus and firewall trial ran out, I installed Grisoft's AVG 8.0 and ZoneLab's ZoneAlarm, both were the free editions, of course!

The Acer Aspire One has onboard memory of 512 mb and mine came with 1 GB of RAM with a maximum of RAM of 1.5 and the wonderfully quick and efficient, Intel Atom 1.6 GHz ultramobile processor. Overall, the Acer Aspire One is a diamond in the rough. You can take it anywhere, but you just have to remind yourself sometimes that you have it with you, because it is so light. I pack mines in a pink, gaming bag that is just a bit larger than the Acer's 9-inch screen, with plenty of room in the bag, for the usb mouse, 4 GB flash drives and power cord and adapter. I have to admit that the 120 GB SATA hard drive is more than enough storage space for my needs, but the Acer Aspire One comes with 3-usbs and one of the usb ports you can use for storage expansion, that is, increase your storage capacity even more.

It has a microphone port, a headphone port, a Kensington lock port, a RJ-45 port to connect an ethernet plug, an external monitor plug and a multi-memory card reader. There is even a webcam that does a pretty decent job in low light conditions and a microphone for live chats, etc.. The wireless card sniffs out a connection with no problems, but once connected, I do notice an occassional disconnect or rather, a "dialogue bubble" appearing, telling me that I am now connected. While this doesn't bother me 90% of the time, I wonder if there is an update for this? I haven't come across any updates on Acer's website or the wireless card provider's site, Broadcom. If, there would be one thing that I wished for the Acer Aspire One Netbook, it would be to have the option to order the 6-cell lithium-polymer battery option. Inherently, lithium polymer batteries are considerably more expensive than lithium-ion batteries and would add substantially to the $327 price that I purchased the Acer Aspire One Netbook for at Best Buy, but heh, I'm not always plugged in, so I need the extra run time. I currently get about 1 hour and 30 minutes out of the Aspire One when lisening to music, using wi-fi and writing in Microsoft Office 2007. All rather power hungry applications, from what I've been told. I wouldn't hesistate for one minute to purchase another of these netbooks from Acer, because they are just that much fun and practical to work on and with. At the very least, they are quite a conversation piece, because everwhere I go, 4 out of 10 times when I'm working on it, someone will come up and ask, where they can purchase one, hmmm, now that's a thought, maybe I should become a reseller or affiliate for Acer, huh? Until next time, don't spend too much.