Acer Aspire One AOA150-1049 Laptop PC A Review

A review of Acer 8.9 ” Aspire One AOA150-1049 Laptop PC Notebook

Aspire One AOA150-1049 will keep you moving fast and will not make your shoulder ache with the weight of the notebook. It will be able to do so while providing you a reasonably good punch of processing power. All this while not escalating the cost beyond your expectation.

Thinking of giving it as a gift – not a bad idea. Comes with an option of a 3 cello or a 6 cell battery that can have a battery life as high as 5.5 hours.

This Aspire notebook has 160 GB of Hard Disk instead of Aspire One AOA150-1572 ‘s 120 GB. Available at Walmart for just $398, this ultra portable notebook features an 8.9″ LCD screen and an Intel Atom N270 processor.

This notebook offers several plus points over the several corresponding notebooks in 8 to 10 inch categories. In brief it has intel Atom processors instead of Celeron processors. It has a decent 160 GB Hard disk and not the solid state hard disks. This Acer has Windows XP and a wireless internet. On the negative side it does not has an optical drive (no CD or DVD), so if you are not tech savvy, you may keep questioning how do Iinstall this program that is on this CD. The option is to get a 2GB ( or 4 GB) USB flash pen drive and use it to transfer data.

The Keyboards on these notebooks are, as expected smaller than normal notebooks and it may take you some time to adjust to the small keyboards. One more thing, if you want to use the remote access feature, you may like to upgrade Windows XP Home to Windows XP Professional.

Let us take a look at some broad specification of this notebook.

Specifications

* Price Walmart (As on Dec 13, 2008): $398.00 * Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Home Addition * Processor: Intel Atom processor N270 1.60 GHz * RAM: 1 GB, 533 MHz DDR * Weight: 2.19 lb * Screen Size: 8.9 inches, WSVGA (1024 x 600) * Hard Disk: 160 GB, SATA * Battery : 6-cell Li-IOn (2200 mAh) * Networking Options: 802.11b/g * USB Ports – 3 * Optical Drive: Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW

Processor

It has Intel Atom processor instead of the Celeron processor in many notebooks in this category. The intel Atom processors have better efficiencies and there are especifically designed for the performance at low power. The 1.6 GHz Atom is good enough for most of the editing works. If you are a programmer who need to compile a lot of software code, you would like to see processor with better performance. This processor is good enough for all daily uses.

Memory

The tiny notebook consists of 1 GB, 533 MHz DDR. This is fairly good as the operating system is Windows XP. Out of the 1 GB half of them is directly soldered into the motherboard.

Battery Life

Under normal surfing conditions, this notebook will last close to 5 hour hour with its 6 cell Li Ion battery. Some Dell notebooks in this category come with higher battery lives. If Battey life is your concern you may like to take a look at Dell E6400 notebook which boasts over 15 hours of battery life.

Screen

Acer Aspire AOA150-1049 has 8.9 inch display that has a resolution of 1024 x 600. The screen is bright and crisp. Most of todays websites are designed for a height of at least 800 pixels, so you may notice some verical scrolling even when you did not expect it.

Ports

Acer Aspire AOA150-1049 has three USB ports. In the absensce of optical drive USB takes center stage. With the cost of USB flash drive so low for a 2GB, it makes sense to keep one permanently for this notebook. It also has Inbuilt Microphone, that allows to make voice conversations.The notebook also has SD Memory Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard, xD-Picture Card.