I have two original Acer AspireOne netbooks. I love them, they are great for internet browsing even light HTML work.. However I really use and abuse these things. So when both of them had their batteries died and I figured out just how much it would cost to update to a new battery in each of them I started to think: “what to do!”.. I am typing this on an HP full size laptop I use for Design work. It has a full size screen and works extremely well for design. The Core 2 Duo processor supports virtualization and has 6 gigs of ram and a huge 500 gig hard drive. Pretty much a full desktop replacement and I really don’t need something else to carry around.
However it’s inconvenient on trains and in Airport security and I am always worried I am going to loose or break it. So I carry around (when not doing heavy work a netbook) an Acer AspireOne also. I take it to coffee shops etc. It’s fine for email and little things.
Well Acer just released a second generation netbook based on the Intel Atom “Z” line of CPUs. This one has a bigger 12” screen that will do 1366x768 resolution (consider that a little better than 720p folks-in full screen full speed video playback glory) 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 250 Gig hard drive. It’s so thin too I couldn’t resist buying one. The keyboard is nicer and the whole unit reminds me a lot of the Apple Mac Book “Air”.. It comes with B/G wireless a VGA port, memory card reader and a number of other very cool features. It came pre-installed with Windows Vista Basic. Almost immediately I updated to Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it and it’s been working great. The only consideration with this unit so far is Aero “Glass” it has an improved Intel GMA 500 graphics accelerator in it. For the most part it works great with Aero glass except when you try to use windows media player with it. Amazingly the problem doesn’t exist at all running windows media center full screen.
The unit even though clocked at 1.3 gigahertz feels faster than the original 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU in my other machines (which have no problem with Aero Glass at al)l.. After some investigation I figured out if I switch to the Windows 7 “Basic” theme the aero glass problem goes away. So for now until the driver issue (and it is an Intel driver issue, Intel if you are watching I know how to fix this or at least get you pointed in the right direction).
I think the speed difference I feel is the Atom “Z” chips seems to have a faster bus speed and the GMA 500 accelerator is faster. At first I was having weird crashing issues with the display driver. After checking out Long Zheng’s blog I realized what was blue screening things was Intel’s really dumb and poorly implemented graphics accelerator power management. My fix to this was simply go into windows 7’s command line and type “MSCONFIG” and turn all that stuff off!
On the startup tab of MSCONFIG I unchecked the boxes that load up Intel’s graphics processor helper apps for the power management and screen scaling etc. In other words everything marked “INTEL” in the startup I unchecked. Saved and restarted and everything has been working like a champ since then..
The Aero compatibility issue is still with me but I just moved down to a basic theme for times in which I use Windows Media Player and everything works out great. Everything else with it running including office is not an issue..The problem is just scrambled video overlay when compositing on an aero display due to memory limits in the unit. If you stay with a basic theme you’ll never ever see this issue. Intel had a problem like this with the original Vista drivers in the original netbooks. I know this is a pointer issue with memory that they could EASILY SOLVE. Maybe Windows 7 RTM hits and they release a REAL Windows 7 driver this problem will be history..
After that issue was over I have a beautiful new windows 7 netbook with all the features I wanted speed and memory for under $400.. Picked mine up at Wal-mart..