Written by After much looking and pondering if I should buy one or even have a need for one, I finally convinced myself that this little netbook was of use to me in one form or another. The Acer comes in various forms, starting at £198 and working it’s way all the way up to £300. The first model would be the A110 which features a 8GIG SSD and 512MB Ram along with a Linpus Linux OS. Once you move into the 150 Range, you have a choice of 512MB or 1 GIG ram, all feature 120GIG SATA Drive and have a choice between Linux (Cut Down) and Windows XP. I checked out a choice of two, one was £229 and had 512MB RAM while the other was the same but had 1GIG ram for example. I thought the bottom square was were the Ram got placed and like any other laptop and I would save myself some Money by the fact I had SO-Dimm Spare from a past upgrade.
After opening the box, I was to find that installing Ram was not as easy as it looked, a Youtube video later and yo had to rip this apart down to the motherboard to get at that Ram. At this point I pondered on taking it straight back before I had opened anything, get my money back and go straight to the other store and buy the 1 GIG model. It is worth noting that the 1GIG model has all that Ram onboard and a slot free, a point to remember. I choose to rip this baby apart and get some Ram in there – I had a week at least to revert and get my money back if all was not good.
I carefully opened it up and installed a 512MB stick of Ram to boost it up to 1GIG, I could have easy put in more (taking from my existing Laptop) but I felt 1GIG was fine for now. Initially I hacked the built in OS (linpus) to get more menu’s as there was not skype installed. I tested a Call with myself via another PC / Skype Phone and me speaking on this Acer via Skype and the build in Microphone. The sound quality as expected was like me inside a Box. I tested streaming with the built in WebCam and again – the quality was blocky. I wanted a full blown OS, so I looked into Ubuntu and this was easy enough to pull off, installing from a USB Stick.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne
After fighting with this for some time, I was left with a few problems, namely sound and Webcam – the latter hanging the entire system. Compiz Works out of the box and is pretty snappy in moving the cube around. The first issue I wanted to solve was to be able to use the webcam inside stuff such as Ustream, Justin.TV and Yahoo Live for example. A Blog had reported that you have to use Flash Player 10 and the fight to make sure 10 was been used was fun but I think I have finally got there. The Audio though is a bit of a different story, the output works fine and can sense when I plug in headphones for example but the Microphone is not happening. If I plug in a Microphone it works fine but the inbuilt (which worked fine on Linpus) is not. I maybe can do some research on this as I may want to use it.
Overall, I would rate this machine as a good buy, it is fast enough to general use and a good Ubuntu Workstation. I would say that putting Windows XP on there would give better control with the included hardware such as Microphone and webcam for example and I may go down this road (Linux was never as good at this part). Should I have bought the 1 GIG version? For mere mortals I would suggest this, I had no problem ripping it open and putting in the extra Ram. The question is though, does the 1GIG model feature all its ram onboard and leave the one slot free (as the 512MB version does) – if this is the case – then maybe it is worth spending the extra £20.
