I'm just a lit ol engineer with no vested interest in any computer company, but I have had tremendous success with the Acer One line of netbooks. I bought my first about 2 years ago, and its my main computer, it runs all of MSoffice suite, including Viso, pepakura, burns dvds, video editting, everything. Not bad for the entry price of $349. There are some pitfalls that you must avoid, and things you must do however, to make this tiny little computer a rocket and up to speed to compete with a typical $1000+ computer. Firstly make sure you get the WINDOWS XP operating system. I cannot comment on the Vista or the new new windows 7 versions, I haven't tried them, but they are still making and selling the Windows XP home edition version. This OS is still the best windows OS I have ever seen. If your daring you may try the windows 7 version, and if your a masochist and no longer have any teeth in your mouth that you enjoy removing with pliers, you can try windows vista, but I wouldn't subject my worst enemy to windows vista. the first thing you must do after you go through the first power up install is remove lots and lots of junk. To make this computer so cheap Acer must of cut a deal with lots of software companies to pre-install cpu sucking bloatware. You have to remove all of this crap. Most specifically, you MUST, MUST, MUST get rid of Mcaffee antivirus. This will reduce even a $2000 monster PC to a turtle, It basically turns your Acer blue into a paper weight. When you read reviews of the Acer blue with people complaining about performance, this is why. None of them know the evil demon that is Mcaffee. This alone will increase speed of your computer 4-8x. I'm not kidding. If you really need virus protection, download the free avast virus protection, its just as good if not better, totally free, and runs almost invisibly. when it does interfere, its little system tray icon "a" ball is spinning, and all you have to do is open it up, pause it, and you have your rocket again. just remember to unpause it when walk away from the computer so it can finish whatever background checks its doing. Other things I throw out is the teaser version of Micro$oft outlook, Micro$oft works, Auto backup software, all kinds of junk. Go through the "add and remove software" section and get rid of it. Also turn off all auto updates, they are killers. Now for $349 it's bare bones, and for a portable laptop this is perfect. its light as a feather, and the screen is pretty good. I just bought my second Acer One for my wife, and the new one is bigger (11.9 inches instead of my 10.1 inches) and fixes the one problem I have with my screen, max resolution of 1024 x600. That 600 really hurts, but the new 11.9 inch one is 1368x768, and the 768 is perfect. the 11.9 also came with an 8 hour battery. I'm really jealous. I should of swapped batteries without her knowing, then I could of at least had that. Not bad for $349 Meantime the other shortcomings that are easily rectified are the keyboard, mouse, big screen, and missing DVD player/burner. The first two are easy. I never use the keyboard and mouse on a laptop anyway, I hate them, the never feel right. for $5 each, you buy a usb full size keyboard, optical mouse, and 4 port hub, and all of a sudden your desktop environment for your laptop "feels" exactly like a full desktop computer. The monitor is a bit more expensive IF you don't have an old one laying around. However, I always have old monitors laying around, so this didn't cost me anything, but I can see how this could add a lot to the cost of the setup. So my wife reused her old 22" viewsonic on the new Acer One and now she's viewing at 1900x1024. Her old desktop environment included a wireless mouse and keyboard, and they ported over to the acer one seamlessly as well. so at this point she is is rocketing on what looks like a $2000 setup for the 2010 cost of $349. What do I do on my 10.1 acer one? I have an old 1024x768 monitor that I have hooked up and I use the laptop's 1024x600 as well. Freaks people out when I drag my mouse from from one screen to the other, Now as far as the DVD burner is concerned. this for me was also a $10 option, but I jury-rigged one. I just ripped out an internal dvd burner and power supply out of an old computer and bought for $10 on ebay a usb to ide converter. this works great. plug in the usb connector into a usb port and bam! I've got a D: drive. that's all there is to it. For burning DVD's the freeware program "cdburnerxp" can't be beat. Ok so my computer is affectionately nicknamed "the milienium falcon" by my wife. she didn't like the idea of of the jury rigged dvd burner, so she was treated to for $50 a samsung usb DVD burner. It works just like my jury-rigged one, but has the added benefits of being 1) tiny about the size of 2 of the old style cd jewel cases stacked, and 2)powered completely by the usb port, no power supply necessary. This has the added benefit of making the dvd player portable as well although I have never had a need for a dvd player when I take my laptop on the road. The samsung usb cable is weird it has two ends for the pc side, your supposed to use 2 of the usb ports for the burner, I only used one and it worked fine for reading dvds, She hasn't tried burning a dvd yet. Oh and you must use the usb port that is directly on the acer one, not on a usb hub.
The only final thing I recommend, and this has nothing to do with the Acer one specifically, is to make sure you have backup storage of your data files. Now the dvd burner is usable for that, but not very conveinent. The acer one's come with a 160gb hard drive, and I like my backups to be complete, so that could take a lot of DVD's, For years now I have always had external hard drives. They are around $50-$100 and work exactly like the external DVD player/burner, only they can store anywhere from 60gb-800gb. depending on the drive. I always tell my wife to make sure that all her files are in at least 2 places all the time, and these external drives are wonderful for this. For my milenium falcon, I usually rip the internal hard drive out of old desktops, and hook them up like the internal DVD burner I use, and use those drives for backup storage. Right now my tiny Acer one has 4 lettered drives hooked up to it, C: D: E: F: where D: E: and F: are all usb drives, I have close to 2TB of storage available. Also my old laser printer works perfectly on the the Acer one, and I know my wife had no trouble hooking up her inkjet printer scanner. --- On Fri, 1/8/10, Paul McCool <[email protected]> wrote: From: Paul McCool <[email protected]> Subject: [Papermodels II 41431] OT-- What a MESS! To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Date: Friday, January 8, 2010, 10:06 PM Well, after going through hell figuring out my wife's video input problem, my own PC decided to have a seizure of its own today. It shutdown unexpectedly, and would NOT reboot until I did a system restore. Now I have to figure out how to redo all of my backed-up files, and put them back where they belong. Not to mention trying to remember how Windows, IE and Outlook all worked 4 years ago. Sheesh! Paul M. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Papermodels II" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/papermodels?hl=en.--
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