Staying connected on the move – Acer Aspire One

My Sharp MMC1100 sub-notebook has finally died. The hard disk has gone the way of all HDs, with increasingly frequent disk errors requiring re-formats, and last week the recovery partition also died, so now it won’t recover. Some hours searching online revealed an unusual pin arrangement on the 1.8″ HD, which means the current drives don’t fit. I may be able to use it by booting from a USB stick, but it doesn’t seem to want to boot off a CD.

So, looking for a replacement, I spent several hours researching current netbooks.

I looked at the Dell Mini 9 (more on that later) and the Mini 10, as well as a Compaq which had a really nice keyboard but a fuzzy screen, an Advent and a couple of others I can’t remember. None of them were quite as nice as my Sharp. And at the top end of the market, they’re starting to get quite pricey.

After much playing about with the display in PC World, I walked out with the least expensive option, which was a Linux-powered Acer Aspire One at £180.

Externally, it’s a nice shiny machine, with a compact 1024 x 600 8.9″ screen defining the size of the unit. It’s a bit heavier and thicker than my Sharp which was exceptionally light at under a kilo, but the smaller screen means it’s more compact over all. Internally, although it only has 16Gb hard disk, that’s more or less the same size as my Sharp’s HD which in practice I didn’t find much of a limitation. In fact, as a solid state disk it should be robust enough to travel on the bike, plus one of the card slots acts as ‘transparent’ extra storage – stick an SD card in, and it’s instantly and seamlessly added to the visible free storage space.

I fiddled about with it over the weekend, it was a nice little machine to work on, nice screen, good keyboard layout and action – I could type on it quite quickly.

The main drawback was the operating system, a flavour of Linux called Linpus. Though I’m not a complete novice when it comes to Linux, I’m hardly an expert, but even so I found the configured desktop ridiculously simplistic, with most of the important functions hidden away by design. I can understand that a netbook like this is aimed at keeping people away from the settings of a OS they’re not familiar with but OSs can be friendly as well as simple.

After a few minutes research online, I quickly found the tweak that gave access to the full dropdown menu and the system settings but it’s somewhat irritating that you aren’t given the option in the visible settings. Even when you get there, there’s not much behind the scenes.

Beyond the desktop, I was very disappointed with the limited customisation of the installed applications. They worked… but are seriously dumbed down, and as soon as I tried to use the machine seriously, I hit a major problem. I couldn’t find any way to display dates in UK format – seems Linpus is US only.

It may not seem a big deal but I use mail an awful lot and I don’t want dates displayed about face.

And although I had changed the desktop font to something less suited to Mr Magoo, I couldn’t find a way to configure the display font for the email program likewise, with the result that the “Outlook Express” style window took up the entire screen if I wanted to see it all. That makes a windowing GUI rather pointless.

More frustrations came from the inability of the mail program to send CCs or BCCs, desktop settings that didn’t appear to “stick” through a reboot, drag and drop via the installed file manager that seemed only to work on certain directories and not others.

Rather more importantly, as I use the laptop to show trainees movies as well as onbike video footage of themselves riding, I needed a decent media player. The installed one had problems with some of my files. I could have re-encoded them but it seemed easier to install a better media player with codecs built in.

Cutting a long story short, the installation of the recommended application from Acer’s own “add-on” site fell over on “missing dependencies”.

Now, call me picky, but I expect an install to work out of the box. I’d not be happy if a Windows set up fell over blaming missing files, and I’m not Linux-smart enough to decode the error messages and work out where to go to fix the problem.

So at this point, I had a vague mind to install XP on it, as I have a couple of spare licences, but in the event I never got that far…

…because it suddenly locked up when shutting down.

On reboot, it wouldn’t display the GUI – the screen showed the Acer “splash” screen, then flickered a few times and got no further than displaying a black screen with a cursor in the middle.

I tried rebooting several times, no go.

So I tried to find an equivalent of “safe mode” in Windows to see what the problem was – there doesn’t appear to be one, I couldn’t even find a way to get a basic terminal mode up. There’s no relevant documentation either with the manual (had to download to the desktop that cos it’s on the machine!!) or online in the usergroups that I could find.

So I tried booting via a CD drive. It wouldn’t boot off the supplied Linpus recovery disk, and neither would it boot off a Puppy Linux live CD which worked fine on desktops.

Running out of options, I did manage to get it to recognise and begin to load a WinXP installation CDROM, but it quickly fell over with a “missing file” error.

I searched the net for the WinXP error message that came up and I got three possible causes:

- damaged disk
- damaged or dirty CDROM
- faulty RAM

I know it’s not my hardware/CDROMs because I have two external drives and two XP installation disks, and all run fine in any combination when plugged in to two desktops!! So I guess it’s the latter, a failed RAM chip. That might explain why it got part way through the boot into the GUI then stopped with a black screen.

So off back to PC World this morning with it back in the box. I explained the problem and then there ensued a short “customer rights” argument with the stroppy bloke behind the counter:

“It’ll have to go back to the manufacturer for testing, we can’t give you a refund”.

“Oh no it doesn’t have to, and oh yes you can give me a refund”.

After they fired it up on site and didn’t get it to complete booting, I got a refund without further argument, but it is frustrating that they try to fob you off after a few days-old machine fails.

I did consider doing a swap. I’m sure I’m a bit unlucky, although it’s far from reassuring when the word “build” is mis-spelled in the BIOS screen, but I decided I couldn’t live with the Linpus OS, and that it would make more sense to have a laptop that ran my favourite XP-based portable applications from my USB stick straight off, without worrying about synchronising mails or running Windows emulators.

I could have gone for an XP installation on another Aspire One, but given the hassles with this one, I wasn’t confident the install would go smoothly, or that a return would be quite so easy if the original OS was missing.

So I have now ordered a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 , which I get tomorrow.

From my research and hands-on time in the shop, the main drawbacks of the Dell are:

- tiny SSD – just 8Gb, so not much will be left after XP is installed, though apparently the “hatches” in the bottom make swapping a bigger one in a genuine plug and play action
- small keyboard and awkward placing of some of the keys, but I’ll guess I’ll live with it
- worryingly for such a low powered machine the in-store demo unit runs red hot. You could fry an egg on it. I’ll keep an eye on this but if it really does run that hot, it doesn’t promise much for the processor life.

At least there is a thriving user group, so I’ll have a read, keep an eye on the heat situation and see if it does cause problems or if it’s me worrying unnecessarily.