Some questions about the One

Hi guys, I'm new to the forums and I've been looking at getting a netbook for a while now, and I've decided it's come down to either and EEE 900 (20gb linux version) or a blue Aspire One (8gb SSD)

I definitely like the style of the Acer better, and the Atom rather than a celeron processor also seems to swing it more towards the One.
Anyway, before I make my final decision, I have a few questions about the Acer in general.
I'm mostly going to be using it for school so just some basic web browsing, listening to music, word processing and writing code, so I think it should have enough power to manage that with no problems. Alright, well there a few more things I need to know about the One, so here goes:

1) As it's for school, it'll be jiggled around in my bag a bit, so will the SSD definitely be better here than a hard drive model? I was trying to decide between a SSD model with the 6 cell battery, or a HD model with a 3 cell.

2) If I was to say, have Open Office running, some music playing, the IM running and anywhere between 10-20 tabs in firefox open, would there be a big amount of lag or would it cope fairly well?

3) The laptop I use at the minute is getting a bit old now, it has a 1.5ghz celeron, 1gb ram, 64mb VIA integrated graphics and a 40gb HD running XP. Am I likely to notice any big difference in performance, or will it be relatively similar?

4) Is it worth installing the extra 1gb ram to make it up to 1.5gb?

5) If I replaced Linpus with a different Linux distro, would I notice a major slowdown due to the SSD?

6) How does Windows run on the SSD? I might need XP for some of the work I do at school as they have XP only software. If it will, I'm willing to try and get into Linux

7) How hard is it to get used to the mouse buttons being on either side, after using them at the bottom for so long?

Woo, sorry for the long post. Thanks in advance for any help

 

Hi Toyota, welcome to the boards!

1. Yes, SSD will be better from a shock resistance point of view as it has no moving parts, but it is not indistructible. The larger battery does extend slightly out of the rear of the unit though, some find this a pain.

2. Should all be fine, not sure about 10-20 tabs in Firefox though.

3. Depends on how you look at it. The 1.6GHZ Atom runs more like a 900MHZ Celeron, but don't let that put you off - Linpus is designed to be lightweight and run on low spec systems, hence boot time is only 20 secs or so and opening applications is comparable to my 2400 Athlon with 1GB RAM (but that machine is plodding on a bit now). Basically, if you don't expect to be running HD video and controlling the large hadron collider you'll be OK.

4. Yes, but this is very difficult to do - One needs to be dismantled, thus voiding the warranty. It isnt a necessity however.

5. Different distros are slower because they are not tailored to the One's hardware. Typically Ubuntu will boot in a minute or so, comparable to a WIndows desktop say. As people tailor distributions to the One's hardware however, this should improve (see http://www.kuki.me/downloads/).

6. Not sure as i haven't done this - OK i assume with a bit of tweaking perhaps? It is difficult to dual boot the Linpus OS and Windows though i think.

7. Not a biggie for me, i don't like it so much but i prefer a larger keyboard, and mostly just punch the touchpad instead.

These are only my opinions, what i may think is good everyone else may disagree with, so please don't buy one based solely on what i've said. Any more Q's post here or PM me.

Good luck with your schoolwork!

 

You can tap the touchpad itself to emulate mouse buttons. I hardly ever use the buttons themselves, so it makes no difference where they are!!

 

Woah, thanks for the fast replies

About the processor, there must be something that it does better than the celeron in the eee 900, or it's the Linux distro or something, because side by side on bootup, the aspire was slightly quicker. Also, the 0.3mp webcam on the One seemed to be a lot smoother and better quality than the 1.3 on the eee :S

Well, I'll get thinking, and I'll come back if I have anymore questions. Thanks for the quick help and good luck

 

Yes, you can't compare a different machine booting a different distro, it's like comparing apples and oranges. The Atom is a better processor than the Celeron in the EEE 701 I think. The Atom is essentially is quite old technology i think, but uses less juice giving longer runtimes on lower capacity batteries. It's also very very small, which is desirable in netbooks.

This may be of interest:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Ato ... ,1997.html

I don't find my machine to be slow when using Linux, based on the fact that i use it for word processing, web browsing etc... It will run Quake 3 more than acceptably mind!

The Aspire webcam is 1.3MP i think you'll find...

 

Really? All the sites list it as 0.3MP. Mine hasn't actually arrived yet so I can't check, perhaps just the high end model (160gb xp) had a 1.3MP camera?

 

I agree about the touch-pad tapping; it beats the hell out of using the left-click button. I only go to the buttons when I need a right-click.

As for comparing the One to the eee 900, the keyboards are very different. The eee is basically un-typable, while the One is very typable. Of course, your mileage may vary, but if that is important to you be sure to check them out in person.......Jake

 

Mmmm.... I've ust noticed the AAO site lists 0.3MP in the specs...maybe it is?

Apologies, will do a little digging around tonight and find out for sure.

 

Yeah, that's one thing I didn't like about the eee, I had a go of both of them side by side for a while, and the Acer definitely has a better keyboard.

Thanks, that was a very good article, and interesting to see just how much slower IE really is over Firefox :shock:

Also I have another question. Does the SSD suffer from the same write cycle limit as other flash memory? Or is the limit so high, I'm not likely to notice it?

 

Hi Toyota,

Yes, it does suffer the limited write cycle problem, but there are things that you can do to minimise this problem; remove swap partition, turn off journaling etc...

Just ask Tom:

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/0 ... te-drives/



I've heard somebody mention that for a hardcore user you can expect sub 5 years, for a casual user (hour or so per day) you can expect 5 years and more. Don't know how this was worked out though, theres a thread on it somewhere here. :mrgreen:

 

Ah, I'll definitely be in the hard core user category then :lol: I want to get into Linux and learn more about it, so I'll probably be using it more than just at school. Thinking about it, the longest I've hard a hard drive go before starting to fail is around 5 years, so I guess that's not too bad

Thanks for your help

 

No problem, good luck with it all!

 

Good news! I just bought the blue 8gb SSD model
I got another question though; how easy is it to get TV-Out from the One? It hasn't arrived yet, so I haven't had a chance to look at it.

 

The AAO has VGA out only, so you can hook it upto a monitor or LCD TV but probably not a CRT TV without a converter. It's as easy as whacking a VGA cable into the port, but i think the resolution is a bit of a donkey - to change it you have to edit a config file i believe, but i don't think it's a big deal. Theres a thread on it somewhere...