Acer Aspire ONE – I’m Thus Far Impressed

I have been carrying out further testing today of my new Aspire ONE netbook.

I like to regularly try out new alternative operating systems, as well as messing with older ones such as Windows 98 and such. To save myself the effort of regularly installing, setting up, formatting and reinstalling I tend to use a virtual machine, such as Virtual Box (which runs on many platforms). Today I created a few new VM's (Virtual Machines) running Ubuntu 8.04.1, Windows 98 and Ubuntu 8.10 RC and was installing all three at the same time, while running Outlook 2007 and installing Steam and downloading my games. While carrying out all these tasks, I also started typing up this article in Word 2007.

As I stated in the title of this article, I am impressed.

There is a noticeable slowdown across all running applications; however the slowdown is not severe enough to render any application unusable. Considering the ONE uses a single core, low power Atom CPU and a slow 2.5" hard drive it's not bad at all. My R&D PC runs a 2.5GHz dual core Athlon X2, 2GB RAM and a 7200rpm hard drive yet performs much worse under similar pressure.

I have installed Steam so that I can try out a few games. It has been reported that the ONE will run Half-Life 2 reasonably well, but I am more intrigued by the performance of the ONE when playing AudioSurf or Peggle Extreme. I will report my findings once I have got everything installed.