A while ago I was extremely interested in the Asus EeePC as an extremely portable sub-notebook that I could take with me on my daily commute to and from University, in order to get some work done or chill out with some addictive little Windows games without the need to carry around a full sized laptop bag all day. After my initial dislike for the original EeePC’s small screen with large black borders, and the imminent flood of similar products to the market, I decided to hold out and see if something better would come along which would give more “bang for its buck”.

Step up the Acer Aspire One.  Hit “read more” to read about my experiences with the machine.

This sexy piece of kit costs £249.99 from Play.com for the white 120gb HDD, 1gb RAM, Atom N270 1.6GHz, Linux model, which is the model I myself decided to place a order for back in July.  Finally a few days ago, the little beauty arrived!  The machine is wonderfully small and light (weighing around 1.2kg or so), looks extremely sleek, and the build feels solid.  It features a 9″ screen (1024×600 resolution), built-in wi-fi, 3 USB ports, a 5-in-1 card reader (as well as a seperate SD card slot for increasing memory), a VGA port for external display, headphones/line-out/mic-in jacks, a built-in webcam and microphone,  Ethernet port, and a DC-in for power.  Not bad, eh?  The most notable exception is that of an optical (CD/DVD) drive, however I can most certainly live without this considering the space it would occupy, as well as the noise it would create and the power it would consume.

The machine booted incredibly fast with the factory loaded Linpus Linux Operating System (I don’t have an exact measurement of the time, but I’d guess around 15-20 seconds in all).  I had a short play with the linux system, but knew that, whilst it was quite nice and fast and all that, I wanted XP on there (this had been my intention right from the pre-order – the XP system was going to cost me extra, so I thought I’d just stick it on there myself).

So, getting XP on it then.  Heres where the (lack of) fun begins.  Since the laptop lacks a CD drive, I had to get Windows XP on there with the use of a USB flash drive.  Whilst this really isn’t too painful a process if you follow this guide, it is painful if you try and do this guide on a Vista machine.  I got all sorts of errors, even when taking certain fixes in the comments section of the guide into account.  The solution?  Perform the preparation on another XP machine.  The guide will take your copy of Windows XP (fully genuine vanilla, not a restore CD) and create a bootable clone of it on your USB flash drive.  Once this is done, it was simply a matter of booting the Aspire One from the USB drive (pressing F12 at boot-up allows you to select which boot device you wish to boot from) and letting Windows XP install.  Following that, the Windows XP drivers can be got from Acer’s website.  Voila, a fully working Windows XP on the Aspire One, and man does it run well!

The laptop handles Windows XP very well, with a very quick boot time (before adding anti-virus and all the other bloaty stuff I throw on to all my computers) and decent battery life (again, haven’t measured a time here yet, sorry).  The screen brightness is excellent, looking much brighter next to my full-sized Toshiba laptop.  The system can also handle a great amount of software/games, such as World of Warcraft, Half Life, and even Microsoft’s XNA platform, which impressed and pleased me a lot.

The touch pad is my only gripe with this laptop: its awfully fiddly, with the buttons to the sides of the touch pad, rather than underneath.  Nevertheless, it does the job, and was probably designed this way in order to conserve space.  The keyboard is really good, and much better than the eeePC’s in my opinion (better size, positioning).  The webcam and built-in mic also perform very well, allowing for mobile video communication with ease.

Overall, I highly recommend this little laptop – large hard drive and memory, efficient Atom processor, great keyboard and screen, built-in sound, webcam and microphone, and a ton of ports for connectivity.  What more could you need on the go?

Update: If you’re using a USB stick >2gb, you might want to try this guide instead.