Saturday, May 15, 2010

Acer Aspire One AOD250-1738 10.1-Inch White Netbook - 7.5 Hour Battery Life Order Now


Since buying an Acer 8.9" Netbook I've been quite pleased with it. The 10.1" version polishes up an already sleek machine to be worth a purchase. I've been hooking up friends with Acers like this current model. And there are improvements.

Compared to my older 8.9" model this lacks a second SD card slot. It only has the one multi flash card reader (high-capacity compatible). In this case they also included a cover that snaps into the slot to keep dust out when not in use. It still has the three USB 2.0 ports, VGA external display port, audio in/out jacks, Kensington lock hole and AC adapter port. The best part is that it uses the same rechargeable battery packs as the 8.9" Acer. If you want a higher capacity battery I recommend the 9-Cell Super-Capacity Li-ion Battery.

Improvements between this and the 8.9" model is the addition of BlueTooth capability and enhanced audio featuring Dolby Headphone technology. And the extra inches results in a bigger keyboard which feels closer to a standard PC keyboard. The best improvement of all is the ease in upgrading the memory. This 10.1" has an easily accessible panel on the underside where you can upgrade the system RAM quite easily for a quick upgrade. The 8.9" Acer lacks that feature.

Just like the 8.9" Acer, because of a lack of external storage all software that ships with the Acer is on a specially configured hard drive with a hidden partition. Most of the drivers are available in the "\I386" subdirectory on the main hard drive. I suggest backing up these drivers onto a flash memory card. If you want a great external drive with both the smooth looks and multiread/burn features I wholeheartedly recommend the LG Electronics DVD+/-RW LightScribe Dual Layer Slim External.

While the Atom processor is very energy efficient it isn't going to win any speed records. But for what it offers, such as very long battery life and portability, I have found no major problems with this netbook. My needs don't demand much in the way of horsepower (usually writing, graphic design and game emulator use with some retro programming thrown in). And this is one of the last models to have XP-Home installed on it which is nice if you found your own experiences with "7" or Vista less than awe-inspiring.

I'm impressed with the changes made to this 10.1" model versus the 8.9" model. Even if you currently have a netbook it doesn't hurt to get another as a spare or to hook a friend up with.

UPDATE 2010-03-08:

One of the gripes that I have with this Acer is that there's more stuff that I had to uninstall from it as opposed to the 8.9" Acer. In particular I removed the unnecessary M$-Office trialware, M$-Works (I'm quite happy with OpenOffice.org) and a very bloated trialware Acer-branded game pack which ate up disc space as well. Also there's a hidden "C:\ACER" folder that contains the installers as well (it still has a hidden partition, though).

What I did was use "Add & Remove Programs" via Control Panel to get rid of the bloat. I transferred the C:\ACER folder to a SDHC card and created a backup DVD-R that contained that and the pre-uninstall of the stuff before I pruned it all (backup made using 7-Zip's very tight LZMA compression).

Still, it was worth the trouble and I still highly recommend this netbook.
Get more detail about Acer Aspire One AOD250-1738 10.1-Inch White Netbook - 7.5 Hour Battery Life.

No comments:

Post a Comment