Advice for a prospective One owner:

Hello all, I saw the AAO in Best Buy the other day and fell in love. I’ve been in the market for a laptop for a few months now, but kind of shying away from the clunky, bulky machines. I have an awesome desktop already that does what I need it to, so I don’t need a laptop that will offer me the same specs. What I want is a little thing that will allow me to surf the net, run PhotoShop and update websites on the go. The One seems to fit that need, while being compact and very pretty. The fact that it’s small and light enough to fit in my purse is a huge, huge bonus.

I’m looking at the 1gig RAM/120gig hard drive XP model, simply because I’m not sure if Linux would support Photoshop. If it’s possible, I’d love to install Linux (Ubuntu) on the XP machine and play with that. If not, I plan to upgrade the RAM and install Vista.

My questions:

• - Will Linux support Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, etc)?
  - Generally speaking, how does CS3 run on the AAO? Fairly well, or glitchy/laggy?
  - Is 1.5gigs of RAM the most we can stuff into this little machine or can it be rounded to 2gigs or more?
  - Does anyone run Vista on their machine? What is the performance like with the factory provided RAM and upgraded?
  - The One doesn’t come with a CD/DVD drive. Is there an external drive that comes more highly recommended than other brands?

Thanks in advance!

 

I don't believe there is a linux version of those apps. Wine might help but I don't think enough to provide you the functionality you might need.
It runs as expected. For light work, it is fine. For heavier filters, it's slow.
1.5GB is the most it will handle (1GB additional module, 512MB is soldered)
I run Vista with 1.5GB and upgraded 320GB HDD. It runs acceptably fine. I would not compare it to my T7400 notebook as it's not fair but it does run well.
I would imagine you would want an external drive that can be powered from the USB port? Lacie is nice, as is the Lite-On or LG models. They are essentially laptop drives in an enclosure.

 

First off, the A1 has a 8.9" screen, 1024x600 resolution. It's SMALL. You will most likely not enjoy using Photoshop, etc, on such a small screen.

Second, your expectations for the performance of the hardware are unrealistically high. Under XP, the A1 has roughly the same performance as a Pentium M notebook from 2004. Even upgrading the RAM, CPU intensive tasks are going to be really SLOW compared to your desktop. For gaming, it's fine for some classics from a few years back, but I would suggest CS or CS2 is going to be far more playable that CS3. There are some videos on YouTube of people playing games like half-life (the original, not HL2) and so forth.

Third. If you upgrade the memory Vista apparently will run okay on the HDD version. Though really you'd have to have very definite reasons for doing so, as it will otherwise only slow down your experience. 1.5GB is the max you can upgrade to.

 

I'd just like to clarify that CS3 = Creative Suite 3... as in, an Adobe software bundle. I don't game.

 

Although, you can drive a pretty big external monitor with the AA1. I've had it hooked up to a 24" LCD running 1920x1200 @ 32BPP. It looks very nice .

 

Well I'm a newbie to Linux and I have found it surprisingly easy to get to grips with. I was going to go the XP root, but I might not bother now, I have started doing quite a bit of web work on it, Bluefish is quite a powerful program and is very similar to Dreamweaver and I use GIMP to do a bit of image editing, there are a few thing missing on these programs and I know its going to take time to get use to wear all the features are on these programs, pulse as pointed out a machine this small is not prefect to be working on, I'm not really using this machine to create a complete website/or image on, more just to modify,update or finish off an existing site/image, which so far its perfect for and been very surprised at the quality of linux programs and may even make my desktop system a dual boot system with linux.

 

Thanks for all the input. I actually decided on an HP Mini Note instead, simply because the keyboard felt a little nicer to me, and it had a larger hard drive and more RAM. The processor leaves something to be desired, but i guess you can't win them all. The CPU can't be replaced simply because HP soldered it to the motherboard, but I assume it's possible to replace the entire motherboard. I haven't opened the thing up, but I've heard talk that HP will be releasing an updated version within the year that drops the Via C7 and uses Isiah (I think that's the name of it) instead. Maybe I'll be able to purchase the motherboard separately and just drop it in.

The Mini Note came with XP, but I'm considering installing Ubuntu on it instead, and using programs such as GIMP, OpenOffice, etc. on it. It's not my main computer, but I plan to use this thing for quick updates, web surfing and maintenance while on the go. I have the entire Creative Suite 3 installed on my desktop, but i figured it would be sweet to have it on a laptop as well. From what I see, GIMP should work just as well for my purposes on the laptop.

Thanks again!