Acer Aspire One A150-1006

Portability is the main target of the netbook and this one does not disappoint. I love being able to pick it up and go to a friends house with out packing up a bunch of crap into a bag. I pick up the acer aspire one and its power cable and I am out the door. Even the power brick on the cable is tiny.

The design of the acer aspire one is very good. There are a few drawbacks that if fixed would make this an even better netbook. The glossy screen can make things hard to read and the screens viewing angle is not the best. Keyboard is not bad, even with my large hands. The trackpad is small and I wish there were room for a larger one.

Once you get used to the trackpad and the mouse buttons being on the side of the trackpad it is not so bad. Definitely not some thing that would prevent me from buying one. The web cam and mic seem to be in a decent place for video conferencing.

Performance of the little intel atom 1.6ghz is actually not bad at all. Most people dismiss them as being under powered and while it is true that your not going to be doing anything heavy like gaming or 3d rendering, it will handle most software. For example I write php for a living and use komodo edit to do my php/css/javascript editing. komodo edit is not a light weight app but still runs just fine on the little acer.

It is great to be able to take it with me and still be able to 99% of my software needs. I have not tried photoshop on it but I am guessing it would run ok in a pinch. The integrated video card handles external monitors very well. I hooked it up to an on 19" crt and set the display resolution to 1280x1024 with no problems at all.

There is one down side and that is the wireless drivers are very slow. I could not even stream a tv show from my file server over the network. I did manage to find an upgraded driver. It offers much better performance. There may even be a newer driver out now as I have not checked on it in months. All in all I really like this little laptop.