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Acer Aspire ONE 522-C5Dkk
by Kahdeksantoista
I am dedicated to Macs and mine is about seven years old; it has been used to death, the screen wobbles to-and-fro and there are three keys missing. I am afraid it will go at any minute. I bought this little beauty because we came into a little bit of money and split it. I chose to spend my money on a netbook. I had a bad experience with ... an Acer before, but this was the only netbook I could afford and my husband and I spent a lot of time checking processor speeds so I didn't make the same mistake again.
I bought it from PC World in Mansfield and I took it home after pushing my way through some pressure selling of their technical support and an antivirus. I didn't buy! It is available in lime green or black. My local store only had it in black, so I settled for that.
It came preloaded with McAfee antivirus which caused me more problems than not. The default browser was IE (who uses that anymore?) so I changed it to Mozilla. The operating system on this device is Windows 7. It comes in a large box with a main colour scheme of black and white. I still have the box and I use it as a mini desk to put the netbook on. It stops me crouching over it and doing my back in when I use it on the bed! Included is some bubble wrap (vital, I think) and a Quick Guide.
My original issue with my old pink Acer was that it seemed to be a device JUST for searching the internet. If you installed anything it didn't half complain - with slowness. I installed iTunes and Windows Movie Maker and that was it. I did not bombard it with lots of programs or documents. In fact, I used my other laptop on which to start, complete and save documents. After installation of two standard programs it ran so very slowly. You wouldn't believe it. This version of the netbook does not seem to have that problem. I asked the sales person if this one came with Movie Maker and he said yes. I was relieved at this because it would mean that I didn't have to install something it wasn't 'used to' and risk slowing it down.
McAfee and Internet Explorer ran very slowly. It would get to a point where I was sat waiting up to two minutes for a page to load. This was rectified slightly when I started using Mozilla as my default browser. It still ran a little slowly and my McAfee subscription started to run out. It ran scans all the time and Mozilla had trouble doing anything. I couldn't watch videos online when McAfee did anything and Mozilla became unresponsive. My husband uninstalled McAfee (what a feat that was) and installed a highly recommended antivirus (a free one). It now runs like a dream!
The keys on the keyboard are not too small (so it is quite suited to both genders with big and small hands) but they are slightly noisy. I am sure this matters to some people when they are on a quiet train or are finishing a presentation for work as their spouse sleeps.
The webcam is quite good, but it is not the highest quality. The picture is quite grainy, but I have seen much worse. I recorded a video of some quiet sounds and there was a constant pipping buzz on the video. When recording a video, your voice may be a bit ahead of your mouth movements!
The adjustable brightness is very varied and the difference between the dimmest and the brightest setting is great, so adjust to your eyes' delight.
It is so light! I got this for travel use. I visit my in-laws a lot and I was used to lugging around a laptop with an aluminium casing. This little thing fits perfectly into my medium-sized handbag, including the charger.
The battery life is fantastic. Never have I found a device with such great battery life. It charges in about an hour and the battery (disconnected from the charger) will last for around five hours. I believe the spec said four hours when I bought it! It gives you plenty of warning when the battery is going low. It doesn't give you two minutes' notice and then pass out.
The charger doesn't have the most adapter friendly plug on the end, but this is a minor disadvantage. It is quite bulky.
It has the usual office programs on it with the useful programs: spreadsheets, databases, word processing and slideshows. I don't think I have had to install anything; everything was already on here for me.
The other day I was panicking because I needed to take some photos to be put on the internet. My husband's camera was dead and we still don't know where the charger is. I have no idea where the cables for any of my cameras are, and the rechargeable batteries went walkabouts during the move. I managed to find the batteries but I was still left with the problem of getting the photos onto any computer! I hunted through the boxes in the other room and discovered my memory card reader. Fantastic. Then, I thought this Acer must have a card built-in card reader like the previous versions. It has! Fear not if you lose your USB cable!
Techno lingo -
Processor: AMD dual-core processor C-50
10.1" LCD screen
250GB HDD
1GB DDR Memory
3-cell Li-ion battery
We chose this netbook because of graphics chip. This is because internet videos, with certain browsers, will use the graphics chip to draw the video instead of the processor. As a result, this means I can watch high-res videos and do stuff at the same time. I needed a laptop that could delivery great quality videos and fast streaming whilst I worked on a word document in the background, for example. I did not want to close a program in order to use another one. This netbook delivered without any problems, except for that damn antivirus.
This is available for around £199 online in various places and consumer electronics stores.
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Asus Eee PC 1011PX
by Belindavc79
I bought the Asus Netbook, simply because of it's size initially. Due to the fact that I'm on the move on a regular basis, it was important for me to have an easily transportable device to be able to do my work on the go. Although the netbook serves it's purpose to a certain extent, I was a little disappointed with the relatively small ... screen and the short battery life. The battery tends to drain extremely quickly. As a media professional, I also tend to have to save a lot of large files on my netbook and unfortunately, the memory just isn't big enough.
It's a shame as the product is very attractive to look at, extremely light (I can slip it in my handbag), but for professional functionality it doesn't quite fit the bill. When the battery runs low, the screen also dulls, so at some points you may have to reach for the charger, just to brighten up the screen. I would recommend the Asus EEE notebook for students or for non-professional users, if you don't need a large memory, this product should be OK for you.
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Acer Aspire ONE D255-2DQkk
by doriee
The Acer Aspire ONE D255-2DQkk is my best friend right now measuring a small 258 mm this little net book can be put away anywhere for safe keeping or just so it is out of the way such as on a shelf, in a cupboard, mine sits underneath my bed ready for the evening and night time browsing, I used to be on this 24/7 however I've become more ... sociable with my family and choose to sit downstairs on the computer so my net book comes out in the evenings, this is small enough to place on your knee and still have room to spare like a cup of tea, I always rest mine on my knee at the same time. This net book weighs a small 1.25 kg, it is very sturdy and light weight allowing you to take it with you while your on the go, I like to take mine out with me when I go to a friends or my sisters house this is much easier than taking a laptop because I don't have to change bag as this fits in my normal bag with room to spare for all my other items.Looks wise this looks very professional, neat and clean, this can come in various colours and you can stickers and cases for the front but mine is a silky shiny black colour like the picture above. The key board on this is very small measuring approximately 200 mm. The keys themselves are set into the laptop and are soft touch keys,this means you can move across the keys with ease while fast typing and not have them sound like your bashing the keys, these keys are also suitable for typing for a long period of time. The touch mouse pad is located below the keyboard a long with the left and right mouse button.
They keys on this net book are most of the keys that are on a full sized keyboard there are all numbers and a QWERTY keyboard set out, all F number are present and arrow keys, some of the other keys such as end and print screen at on different keys rather than like a normal keyboard where they have their own key, the keys are rounded at the corner and because they are the thinner keys it is easier to move from one key to the next if you are a fast typer like me you will know what I mean, sometimes on bigger set keys I spell a lot of words wrong. The start up button is a silver button located above the keyboard. The touch pad is very sensitive and if you touch it to hard it will sometimes do what you never intended to do and also if you have more than one finger on it in different places it will also do something different, but most of us know how to use a touch pad mouse anyway, the touch pad is very fast and thankfully the mouse is able to keep up with it but for some reason sometimes you lose the curser on the screen and you have to wiggle about on the touch pad to find it again.
Every so often your going to need to give this net book a good clean especially if your using it as often as every day, there are several ways you can do this, you can take an very lightly damp cloth and just run it over the screen keys and casing however you need to make sure this is barely wet otherwise you could cause some unintended damage, another way it to just give the casing and screen a quick dusting because of it's shiny casing you do see any specks of dust or any marks on this. I eat and drink while on my laptop and I find there are lots of crumbs and food go between my keys and I don't want it to go mouldy and my keys stop working soi bought one of those tiny keyboard Hoovers to get all the little bits out that fall down the sides and then wipe over the keys with a cloth, you will need to clean the keys as they carry an extreme amount of bacteria.
There isn't too much you have to do to set this net book up, it automatically comes with everything you would need to get the internet up already on it all you have to do is set up the writing size and various things like that and of course put in your account details for example mine is under my own name and how old I am, things like that and then you just have to connect to your wireless connection. Starting this up the windows loading screen comes up within a few seconds, it only takes roughly a minute to load the net book to the main windows screen which is great for if you are in a hurry and don't have time for a slow loading time, the net book will automatically pick up your internet connection that you originally installed when putting the wireless net-book on of course this also depends on how fast your internet connection is, if you have a bad overall connection it will also be bad on the net-book.
Despite the websites saying this will support windows 7 this is very misleading as the highest it will support is windows XP which in my opinion is the best windows anyway, this will only support windows 7 if you buy this version of the net book with it already installed. This was one of the last net books/laptops and computers to be sold with windows XP on it so when I browsed through it I was please to see they had put a massive amount of Microsoft software on it, this included MS word, excel, power point, movie maker and a lot more as well even though I knew I would only use MS word this pleased me a lot. One of the first things you will want to do is replace the internet explorer browser with the google chrome browser because it is faster and more efficient, the pages load within seconds and every click is very smooth and fast, like the internet should be
I download a lot on my net-book ranging from programmes to games to music to films. Downloading programmes such as I-tunes, VLC player these are really fast to download taking only a few minutes to fully install and complete the process but of course again this mainly is due to your internet connection. Getting music and films on this net-book is also very quick taking no more than 20 minutes to get a full tv series and again of course this does vary and depend on the internet connection. Playing games on this net-book is really good, the graphics card isn't overly large but it is big enough to support gaming on face book and other silly games such as bejewelled and gold miner, however these games run extremely smooth without any lagging except I found that on castle vile on Facebook when your castle area expands a lot it takes a long time to actually load the game so I gave up on it. As for games such as World of Warcraft or mine craft I found that this wasn't very suitable as it took to long to load and when it did load actions were delayed and it look a while to move around the maps. As for watching films this doesn't have a disc drive which is why it is so compact and small however you can download programmes such as VLC player and this allows you to watch films on it which is what I do, The VLC player is a little slow to start up the film but no buffering is required it will start straight away with no jumping or lagging, it is also in sync, the sounds is very crisp but I always plug mine into my stereo so that I can listen to it as if it was on my Television.
This does not have a built in disc drive which allows it to be compact and small although you can buy an external disc drive that plugs into your net book via USB this is automatically picked up by your net book there i no installation needed, this will allow you to watch films, play games or do other things such as transfer music or pictures to a disc or other important files in case anything does happen to your net book. The durability of this net book is great it is really sturdy and mine has been dropped more times than I'd acre to say, the amount of food and drinks that have been splashed on it and it's still going strong, however if you do happen to spill a drink over this make sure you wipe it straight away but if it gets under the keys or behind the screen then you are not going to be using this net book any more. The battery life is really good, if this is fully charged which only takes a couple of hours to charge it to 100% the battery will last up to 8 hours but of course will be cut short if you are play games but if your just doing general browsing or on Facebook the battery will last next to 8 hours. However do be warned the wire isn't as long lasting as the laptop and you'll find this will break after about a year and you'll have to replace it.
You can buy this from pretty much anywhere that stocks pc's/macs/laptops and net books such as super markets, argos, pc world and more. This was originally £250 but I bought mine refurbished for £180, refurbished is basically a new used item. Someone has bought this item, opened it and returned it because they simply didn't want it, it has then been sent back to the manufacturer, wiped and then put back to it's original settings and then in fresh packaging.
RAM - 1GB
Hard drive - 160GB
Webcam - 1.3 megapixel
3 USB Ports
Memory card reader
LCD screen
screen size - 10.0"
height - 24 mm
width - 258 mm
depth - 185 mm
Graphics card intel graphics media accelorator 3150
8 hour battery life
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