Bought Saturday, returned Sunday

Just thought I'd post this for everyone considering this machine: try it before you buy it.

I had a hard time finding one of these on display to mess around with so I just bought one, knowing I could return it if I hated it. It's a sexy machine and the screen is beautiful, but the machine is SLOW and FLIMSY. It completely bogs down on videos and websites my Wind churns right through. Booting up and opening programs takes ages. The keyboard is just strange. The keys are broad and flat and weirdly oversized, making it almost impossible to touch type on since your fingers quickly lose track of where they are over the completely uniform typing surface. And the keyboard itself is just ... squishy. There are spots on the right side that feel fine, but then there's the ASDF side, which feels just awful.

The screen doesn't feel as flimsy as some people say, but overall the machine doesn't feel like something you'd toss carelessly in a bag with some heavy textbooks on your way out the door. It feels very fragile and the screen does distort under even light pressure.

So: painfully, painfully slow. My Wind blows it away @ 1.6Ghz, but at 2Ghz there's just no contest. A SD Family Guy episode on Hulu that my Wind played flawlessly in fullscreen was a slideshow on the Acer. Heavy websites like Engadget take a while to open and are sluggish to navigate. Awful, spongy keyboard. Overall cheap, flimsy-seeming construction with a beautiful HD screen that feels as if it'd crunch if you dropped it even once.

You may love it but try it before you buy it! My Wind, especially in Turbo mode, feels like a raging monster next to this thing. Why Acer would build such a study in contradictions is beyond me. A beautiful, sexy machine with an awesome screen saddled with cheap construction, a truly awful keyboard and a processor designed for something much, much smaller and unassuming. When you sit down in front of that big, sexy pixel-rich screen and those freakishly broad keys you expect to be able to do things and the experience quickly degenerates into frustration and disappointment. This is essentially a low-power MID in a comically oversized body. Give it a 5" touchscreen and slider keyboard and it'd be a marvel of technology.

 

I came from a 8.9" aspire one to the 11.6

The vista install made the unit slow, as you describe... especially with all that CRAPLOAD of pre-installed software! please tell me you at least unistalled all that junk, mcaffee alone was slowing the system to a crawl!

I dumped vista, installed XP, used setfsb at startup and triggered on resume with a .bat file to make sure the unit is always clocked at 1.45ghz and I couldn't be happier. The overlock even works while on battery, and speedstep still slows the processor as usual, and then scales back up to the max 1.45ghz

The machine is thinner, much thinner... does not feel flimsy to me, except a bit when its open but its not bad by any means... but with being so thin, you would need to make it out of something other than plastic to not flex a bit. I LOVE the screen and keyboard... it doesn't feel overly mushy to me, I like the soft feel, its a silent feel.

At first I had second thoughts because of the CPU speed... but after switching to XP and keeping it overclocked, considering I only spent $398 bucks, I am keeping this bad boy for a while, and I am happy!

 

Nice to read your counter review. Especially because I just
"pre-ordered" an 11.6 Pro from JR.com at $379 with free shipping (to US)
minus another 5% savings using Bing.com's cash rebate.
JR has more than a dozen 11.6 models listed including 3 cells for $349 minus Bing's 5%.

I purchased a Lenovo S10 3 months ago, BTW
Great machine, but the limited display resolution makes me crazy.

I visited Taiwan in May and was surprised to find the 11.6 Aspire being sold
everywhere. Such a nice machine. But in Taiwan, it was $20,600 NT, which is $626 USD.

 

I will definitely be waiting for the new CULV 11.6" Timeline on the front page. The 1241Mhz CPU in the 751 is really just awful.