Acer Spire, is this the 'One' (Acer Aspire One A110X)

Member Name: Patman99

Product:	Acer Aspire One A110X
Date:	14/03/09 (221 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small & lite, with a good battery life. Also very well built.

Disadvantages: Very slow, icons to small & comes with pre-installed crapware.

My son bought one of these the other day, having had a play with it, I'm not that impressed with the speed at which it runs. I used to own an early EeePC, and that was much faster.

This is a well-built little sub-note, but it does have it's problems. Its Atom CPU is rated at 1.6GHz, but in reallity, it struggles to run even Windows with any great speed.
This sub-note (can't call them 'netbooks' anymore as Psion trademarked the name 10 years ago) runs slower than an old 897Mhz Toshiba laptop with 512Mb RAM & Windows XP.

The initial first boot-up took over 30 mins as Windows had to install 9 drivers (2 alone for the camera). Being Windows-based, this already slow sub-note also has to run anti-virus software. In this case, McAffee is the program of choice for this. Although mediocre in providing actual protection, it does the job long enough to download & install Avast.

Typically, MS has installed its 60-day trial of 'MS Office Student Edition', if you already have a copy with a 3-computer licence installed on another PC, don't bother tying the product key with this version as it won't accept it.

The screen is nice and bright, but to see the icons clearly, you will need to increase the font size a little.

WiFi is very good at picking-up networks, and, being Win XP, configuring the connection is as easy as entering your WPA password.

The ASUS EeePC was originally designed for children, so had nice strong hinges. The Aspire One, although aimed at at different demographic, still has good, strong hinges. You also get 2 card slots, one of which handles SD cards, and the second handles SD, MS, MS Duo & Pro, and MMC cards. Theres no support for the faster, higher-capacity CF cards, but as these only tend to be used in DSLRs & HD camcorders, this isn't an issue.

A plethora of USB ports makes connecting external kit from mice to printers a doddle, unless that is, you need to install drivers. The One has no CD drive, so any drivers required need to be downloaded from the net (or copied across onto a USB pendrive on another PC). It does make me chuckle that the re-installation media is a CD, and not an SD card.
The keyboard is nice and responsive and has a smooth touchpad built in.

The battery life is good at around 4 hours constant use.

I have heard that there is a version of this which runs Linux, knowing how much more efficient this is, I would expect it to run about 20% faster. However, I haven't seen, or tried this model out yet.

UPDATE
My son has been lugging this to school nearly every day, and, unlike his Samsung, it is still intact and has no missing parts.
I am very tempted to buy one for myself.

Summary: Would run better with Linux or a lite version of Windows XP.