Acer Aspire One - is it good or not good

I'm after a netbook for downloading photos while on location, so it needs to be fairly robust.
The AAO specs look good, with plenty of HDD space and a nice screen, but I keep reading negative threads about AAO. From not booting, to working and then no display and then having to flush the BIOS, etc.
Is the AAO a bit flakey or is it OK?

 

I bought one for the wife a few weeks ago and so far have been very impressed with it.
Build quality appears quite solid, screen resolution and brightness is very good and wireless performance is excellent. We got the 6 cell battery so battery life is amazing.
As I read the reviews many of the problems you mention seem to be asociated with the linux version - the wifes has XP.
So far I completely recommend it.

 

spud, from CA home office forum?

 

I've only had mine for few days now, and just ordered a micro Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR USB adapter that I will be soldering onto the back of the motherboard, and a 1GB ram upgrade to max it out at 1.5GB. Total cost for both items, shipped is $26.

This thing is like the VW beetle of laptops, as far as I am concerned. It's reliable, there's tons of stuff that you can do with it, or for it, and it seems like it's built very well. Many of the complaints that I have seen are from the SSD/Linux versions with the 3cell batteries. In addition to most of the complain ts being centered around these models, the users are usualy also trying to modify the machines, flash the BIOS without knowing how to do it properly, and otherwise making uninformed decisions regarding their purchases...and then blaming it on the laptop.

My own model is a White ZG5 160GB, 1GB of RAM, 0.3MP webcam, Windows XP. I am loving it. I have two VMs on it already (under VMWare Workstation), one that's an XP VM for connecting in to work, and one that's Ubuntu 8.10 for learning more about Debian based linux. It runs a single VM just fine, I think two would be overkill.

I can play ripped DVDs just fine. AVIs/DivX/XviD up to h.263 just fine. h.264 encoded files are possible, but it depends heavily on the bitrate of the video. Anything about about 5000kb/sec is too much to handle (at least on 1GB of total RAM...a faster HDD and another 512MB of RAM might change that). 720P and 1080p x.264 encoded files in mkv containers are too much for the laptop to handle, either on a wired network or over the wireless.

The interesting thing is that unlike with normal laptops, where you have the horsepower (usually) to play back this content, but not the bandwidth (if you're wunning wireless) to handle to stream well (recall this is only wireless G...although you could go to wireless N). So what ends up happening with the Aspire One is that you have enough wireless bandwidth to play the files that the laptop is capable of playing, nothing more, nothing less.

I also have put Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed on it, and am able to run this at 1024x600@32bit with everything on high, and FRAPS reports that the laptop is holding between 50-60FPS without fail...awesome for a 2.5lb package!

 

Hi Awake, no, a different Spud...LOL