My new Aspire One Netbook - AO751h

Today I want to talk about my newest toy. I just picked up the new Aspire One netbook last Saturday. I decided that I was tired of squinting at the 8.9-inch screen of my old AAO. This is the 11.6-inch, AO751h model. My first impression is that I really like the looks and size of this model. 11.6-inches is a great compromise. I don't have to squint, and It's still small enough to be ultra-portable. The keys are 100% normal size, which means I don't feel like a giant trying to type in a URL or an email.

Once I turned it on, there was a huge problem right away. It took almost 2 hours for it to startup for the first time. It seems that Acer hadn't installed the drive image! The image had to be loaded onto the secondary partition via the primary restore partition. You'd think Acer would have had the time to do this before sending this thing out the door. I mean it just helps with first impressions. This Netbook comes with Vista Home Basic. Anyone who knows me knows, I HATE Vista! It's slow and clunky and the "Click and wait" feature is unbearable. I thought I would at least boot up this system, just to see how well it worked.

Windows 7

I can say that I did wait until it was finally finished loading before I powered it off (by holding the down power button, as if to give me the great feeling of satisfaction of actually killing the OS - Did I mention that I HATE Vista???) I immediately installed Windows 7, or as I like to call it "The Apology". My experience was not terrific. It seems that the video chip (Intel GMA500) is not capable at this point of supporting the Aero feature of Windows 7 without bringing the system to a crawl. Aero makes Windows 7 looks so nice! And I love the eye candy. So after fiddling with the driver settings for a while I decided that I would instead install another operating system. Windows 7 would have to wait until it had a decent driver.

OSX86

My next OS to try was OS X. Without any investigation, I just popped in my iDeneb 10.5.6 disk into my external drive and fired it up. It didn’t get too far into booting before it froze up. It seems that NONE of the hardware is supported in OS X. So this netbook will not be a Mac clone either.

Windows XP

XP has yet to disappoint me. It has been around so long now that it basically always works. I had XP installed and updated without any issue. All the drivers are available via the Acer website, so it’s a no-brainer install. This netbook comes with 2 gigs of Ram and a 250 gig hard drive. So XP is very happy on this system. The AO751h uses the Z520 processor clocked at 1.33GHz. It’s not a POWER machine by any means. But it performs totally fine for a netbook. I did find out that I can over-clock the processor via a software utility. If/when I play with that feature, I’ll let you know.

Ubuntu

I have just installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my netbook via the Wubi installer. I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet, but I can see that the GMA 500 is not setup correctly. The video looks 1024x768 instead of 1366x768. I’ll have to fix that.

A quick note; everything else looks like it was detected and is working. Both Ethernet and wifi work right out of the box. Also sound works fine too.

I’ll update when I have time to go through everything completely.