New toy – Acer Aspire One

I was in PC World the other day and I picked up an Acer Aspire One A110 on sale. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now, so they were selling the 1GB RAM/16GB SSD/Linux ones for €200. It’ll do the job for web & email when I’m out ‘n about.

The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.

I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no optical drive. I followed this guide to installing XP using a USB key, and after an age (well 2 1/2 hours actually) I had a working XP install. The problem is that this isn’t the speediest of hardware (the SSD in particular is woefully slow) so there’s a huge amount of tricks and hacks to get it running at an acceptable speed. In the end I decided to revert to Linux.

There are a few distros tweaked to run well on these systems. About the best is Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It’s an official branch of Ubuntu, so gets continuous support/maintenance. I ditched Evolution for Thunderbird, but other than that it’s pretty much perfect out of the box.