Cool Stuffs Review

I have to say right at the top that I'm not a big fan of the small form factor laptop genre in general. I've given them plenty of chances -- remember those dinky Toshibas with the webcam on the swivel and the 3x7" screen? No? count your blessings -- but they've all managed to let me down for one reason or another. Batteries that don't live up to their longevity hype.. lousy performance.. overheating.. poor durability.

So it was with some trepidation that I undertook a work project to determine if the latest round of netbooks could work feasibly in a specific work environment. This is a workflow that begs for a small machine that has lots of battery life, at least 1024x screen resolution and brightness, a *usable* keyboard, durability, and enough performance to run a Citrix session. Expandability is a plus too -- VGA out, and at least two USB ports. Good WiFi radios. And that's it. Oh, and do it for under $400, OK.

The first unit that came in was the Aspire One. Although it was appealing right away, with sleek looks and a bright screen, it suffered the same malady of all the other Win netbooks I've seen: XP Home. Granted, Pro is available, but the WiFi and power features of newer operating systems just aren't in XP. And, as usual, the Acer was loaded with enough crapware (including the dread McAfee Suite and a 60-day trial of MS Office Home&Student) to turn the system into just another bloated laptop with a screen that wasn't big enough.

XP had to go. But what to replace it with? Any Linux distro is out of the question given the target environment. I didn't have an eval copy of Vista that would work. But I did have this Windows 7 Release Candidate, that promised to be fully functional until next March. Would this possibly work on such a small "underpowered" system?

The Win7 Compatibility Analyzer said "go for it". So I took the plunge. After bumping the RAM to 2GB (one caveat: there is nothing in the manual to show you how to do this, and the bottom cover on the RAM slot is very difficult to remove; you have to squeeze it in from the ends a bit to pop it out), and using the included recovery software to create a recovery disk set (fortunately, I have a USB DVD burner; I guess that's one way to keep the cost down on these -- don't include recovery disks -- eegads), I fired up my freshly downloaded Windows 7 RC 32bit image and did a "custom" install (the only option, even though "Upgrade" is listed in the win7 install menu; you can't upgrade anything but Vista).

Talk about night and day. The install went perfectly, with no driver issues *at all*; the few drivers that weren't included in Win7 installed from the driver images I downloaded from Acer support, and went in without a hitch. The system didn't find my HP Photosmart 3300 printer on the network automatically, but once I gave it the IP address it located the printer and installed the drivers. No 120 meg HP download required.

And the Aspire One runs Windows 7 as if it was designed for it. The "Windows Experience" rating is 2.1, if that means anything, with the low score based on the video system -- but it runs Aero just fine, with no jaggies; everything pops up and down smooth and purty. Streamed AVI video files over the network look great. The 1024x600 resolution lends itself well to HD images. The speakers are only so-so, but considering the size of the system, they can't be more than an inch across, and there's a headphone jack on the side anyway.

And battery life? I used the system from a full charge, battery only, to play a constant stream of music on iTunes from my main system library, while browsing the web.. and watched a full movie on WMP (Midnight Cowboy).. and installed a few programs like Open Office 3.1 .. and surfed some more.. and after 5 hours 20 minutes of this I finally got a "Your battery is critically low" message.

I'll have more details and a video on my blog (http://maximumentropydigest.blogspot.com) soon, but so far, this one's a keeper, and yes, Virginia, you can Windows 7 it.Get more detail about Acer Aspire One AOD150-1920 10.1-Inch Ruby Red Netbook - 6.5 Hour Battery Life.