Remember last November I wrote about the Eeepc notebook computer that Asus were selling for £170. It wasn't the fastest, slickest computer on the planet but was good enough to surf the Net, write documents and send emails on. I thought it would be ideal for anyone looking for a computer just for those sort of tasks particularly if they wanted something they could take away on holiday or use in the garden.
It wasn't going to be long before Asus were going to refine that idea. Faster processors, longer battery life and larger screens have brought the price of their latest offerings up to about the £300 mark. At that price point they are verging into the territory of more powerful laptop designs.
In the meantime, other manufacturers have cottoned on to the idea including Acer with their Aspire One range.
Priced at £179 with a faster processor, larger screen, larger keyboard and better build quality than the original Asus 700 series, this seems to me to represent excellent value of money. So I have one on order along with a 16Gb SD card to boost the storage capacity.
The idea is that I'll use the Acer instead of my Dell laptop which is about eight years old now. With its top of the range specification (for the time) , it could almost be considered a desktop replacement. When I was at Anfield I used the Dell a lot. I've used it here in Spain especially when we have visitors and I can't get into the spare room.
A couple of years ago, the laptop had slowed down to a crawl taking ages to boot up into XP so I reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows. That made a vast improvement rendering the machine useable again. The battery life is down to about 20 minutes but no matter I can still use it on mains. The problem is it is so damn big and heavy and way over the top when all I want to do is send an email, find some information from the Net or write an item for this blog.
The Acer is about the size of book (249mm (W) x 170mm (D) x 29mm (H)) and weighs a shade less than a kilogramme. It is not quite a palm top but certainly won't cook and crush my knees like the Dell does. It runs a version of Linux (the operating system of choice by my good friend Pete Brooks) which apparently loads up ready to use in under 30 seconds. So when Pam asks me a question about the bank accounts or wants me to find out what is on Digital+ at the weekend - the Acer will provide the answers in double quick time
Of course the notebook has limitations so I will still use my Dell desktop for serious work like photo editing etc.
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