I love my original mode Acer Aspire One, it’s an extremely versatile netbook that offers few things to complain about. Those things that do exist aren’t really surprising either, but I thought I’d go into a couple of them, based strictly on the fact that I tried these, and it was obvious I was pushing the machine and its Atom processor too far!
- VLC 1280×720 Playback - There is a myriad of reasons that this probably didn’t work. Not only did it stutter badly because the CPU was spiked, I was also trying to play this over a WLAN network! Grant you, Wireless-G can push some data, but it just can’t do both. My recommendation is to keep the video you play on this to DVD sizes or smaller, the Atom processor just isn’t powerful enough to decode much more than that.
- TV Tuner – It’s not because it could not process the analog stream (I did not even try HD ClearQAM Digital). It’s because it can’t handle this AND timeshift. Some of this is my fault as I replaced the hard drive built in with a 60GB OCZ Core V1 SSD, which is formidable in the AAO, it’s not made for the random and quick writes and re-writes of the timeshifting features of both the built-in software OR Windows Media Center. What’s worse, there isn’t a way to turn them off! So, through the limitations of software to just serve basic purpose, this really doesn’t fly on here.
- Gametap – This is a video card limitation, and I need to beta test it more, it’s been awhile since I’ve tried this. GameTap requires a full implementation of OpenGL 2.0, which the Intel Integrated Wireless doesn’t do. There’s probably a middle ground here that I haven’t found, as I suspect many of the games, emulated or not, will do fairly well on here.
Every other task I’ve thrown at it up to this point, it’s done to my satisfaction. These are, of course, realistic wants, I don’t expect to be playing the Orange Box on this, and I don’t want to use it as an encoding box for anything. It’s a basic CPU, but with enough memory and a decent OS, can do great things. Anyone expecting more out of this in any netbook is nuts, and yes, that includes the $1,000 ones from Fujitsu or Sony, even if they have better displays, are smaller, and admittedly look cooler and smaller.
I’m still plenty happy with my Aspire One. My original model is down below $250 now, it’s worth getting. Really!
