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Acer Netbook Review

I've been putting off doing this review because I wanted to make sure I had used my new netbook long enough to give a thorough review of it.  There's nothing worse than someone giving a review of something that they've only played with for a few hours.  Those kind of reviews are good for giving you a "first look" at something, but to really know whether or not something is worthwhile, you need to have used it for quite awhile, especially something with as much depth as the Acer Aspire One Netbook.

I bought the first Aspire One, (later on that), for my wife for Christmas.  She had a desktop, but that had been a replacement for a Dell Inspiron 600 laptop that she no longer had.  She really missed her laptop and I was thinking about getting her one.  I saw the Aspire One being advertised on HSN (Home shopping Network).  I'd seen netbooks before, but they were always the low-power, linux versions.  This was a whole new flavor.  The Acer Aspire One netbook has an 8.9" screen with a resolution of 1024x600.  1gb of ram, a 120 gb hard-drive, and an intel atom processor running at 1.6 GHz.  Most importantly, it runs on the Windows XP home operating system rather than Linux.  It also had a built-in webcam and microphone, 3 USB 2.0 connections, and 2 media card readers slots.

I was quite excited by this, and thought this could be a great solution for what my wife wanted.  HSN was selling them for $499 each.  I wondered if I could find one of these for less at a favorite internet shopping site I love, TigerDirect.  Lo and behold, I found the exact same netbook selling there for $359!   A savings of almost $150 and with $1.99 shipping and handling (a special deal being offered in early November of 2008).  I didn't even have to think about it, I made the purchase and it was delivered to my door the very next afternoon. 


Luckily, my wife had to go to work for six hours shortly after I received it, so once she was gone I opened it up to make sure the purchase was worth it and to also get the computer set up so when she opened it on Christmas morning she wouldn't have to deal with all of that herself.  The set-up was quick and painless and within an hour I was on the internet downloading and setting up some of my wife's favorite programs she can't live without.  Before she came back home, I had her computer set up and packed away, and in the process I'd fallen in love with it!  It was such a delight to use with it's small form factor, yet just as powerful as my own desktop computer!

I lasted about five days before I caved into my desires and went back to TigerDirect and bought myself a netbook!  I'd made my purchase a day before Thanksgiving, so it took a little longer to get it, but within a week I had it and was setting up my own little wonder.  Unfortunately, I had to keep it a secret from my wife, or she'd know what I'd gotten her for Christmas. 

It's now April, and we've been using our netbooks for about 5 months, and we still love them.  Actually though, we have 3 netbooks in the house now, about a week after Christmas, I bought yet another netbook for my son, who was green with jealousy over our new computers.  His is exactly the same except that I was able to get his with a 160 gb hard-drive and paid $10 less!



Subpages (1): netbook part2