FIGURE B


screen shot of the Acer Aspire One in action Roll over picture for a larger image.

I spent quite a while at the store typing to see if I'd be comfortable with the keyboard, and despite its small size, I do find it easy to use. My unit had a sticky left-hand arrow when it arrived, but popping off the key and cleaning underneath took care of that. The touchpad works well, although the left "mouse" button makes an annoyingly loud click, so I tend to just tap the touchpad instead.

The built-in webcam takes reasonable (although washed out) pictures. The integrated sound card is decent, and sound through my iPod headphones is clear and rich.

So, that's what the Aspire One has to offer. Now, how does it work?

Using the Aspire One
This is difficult to answer. Ninety-five percent of the time, I am thrilled with the device. The other five, though, involves dropped Internet connections, unbearably slow performance, and a deletion of a full novel's file that nearly resulted in the netbook (or me) going off my eighth-floor balcony. I'll discuss each of these below.

Internet access is obviously crucial for a netbook. The Aspire One has a built-in 802.11b/g wireless card and also a LAN port for wired connection. I haven't tried it wired as the room where I use the device has no cabling, but the wireless connection is strangely inconsistent. I can view a page, hit refresh and have the connection lost, hit refresh again and have it back again. This does not happen on only a specific Web site, nor does it happen all the time, which makes it difficult to trouble-shoot. The dropped connection also happens while checking my Outlook Express email, and the netbook has dropped a connection while sitting right next to my old laptop which keeps its connection throughout.

The odd thing is that the wireless network icon in the task bar never fluctuates, so the unit thinks it's connected but isn't. For my purposes, the Internet issues are merely an inconvenience (and, in fact, occasionally a spur to get back to writing and stop playing online) but they should not exist.

The bigger problem is the speed of the device. I was not expecting light-speed from a $300 laptop, but I do expect that when I double-click on "My Computer", something will happen in less than six seconds. Here again, sometimes the device actually delivers seriously fast speed, and then on the next click it's painfully slow again. I followed several online "speed up Windows XP" guides and the performance is better, but still inconsistent.

Thinking of the novel-deletion incident gives me hives. I was giving my most recent book one last read-through and correction before sending it to literary agents. I'd spent two good hours and made a lot of small changes, none absolutely critical but all making the book just a bit better. I am paranoid about saving my files regularly, so I was saving at the end of each page.

Then I hit Save, and Word announced that it couldn't save to that location, and shut down. Feeling a little ill, I re-started Word and went to open the file...which was gone. It had been erased.