My netbook
Now that I’ve had my itsy-bitsy laptop for about a month, I’m ready to give you all a full review of it. I love it! Ok, that’s enough, right?
No, alrighty then… The specs for my baby (the Acer Aspire One in sapphire blue) are:
- Windows XP Home
- 1.6G Atom Processor
- 1G RAM
- 1.3 MegaPixel Webcam
- 2 media card readers – one multi-format, one SD only
- 160G Hard Drive
- 802.11b/g Wireless
- VGA and Audio out
- 3 USB ports
- 1 free mini-PCI slot
- Ethernet port for wired connections
- Size (LWH): 6.7 inches, 9.8 inches, 1.14 inches
- Weight: 2.2 pounds
I got the 6 cell battery option, which gives me around 6 to 6 1/2 hours of regular use between charging – which is pretty freakin’ nice! That makes it a touch bigger/heavier than it would be normally, but not so much that it bothers me at all. It’s got a standard keyboard layout with the keys at about 90% of the standard size – so my little hands have no problems and even men with larger hands seem to be able to use it easily. The sapphire blue is gorgeous – but shows fingerprints like nothing I’ve ever seen – I’m constantly wiping the cover down… 
It has a quick boot time – under 30 seconds – and is pretty speedy, considering the limited amount of processor in there! The screen is 8.9 inches and it’s fairly small for everyday work (though I end up using it a lot – I only use my desktop setup for writing, and that’s just because I’ve got a dual monitor setup for that one) but absolutely perfect for traveling.
I took the netbook with me to Internet Librarian this year and found that it was just about perfect for carrying around during sessions and such. There were a bunch of folks with these tiny little laptops around, but I still got a bunch of comments about it every time I sat down and fired it up. Helene Blowers has one of the original netbooks – the Asus – and we had to set them down and compare our teeny tiny laptops – you’ll note mine (on the left) is a touch bigger, but not so much as to be really noticeable.

All in all, I love my little tiny laptop and I’m pretty sure that I have found the perfect traveling companion (at least until my phone beefs up and can start to compare with some of the specs I posted above…). For the price ($400.00 at Amazon.com), it just can’t be beat!
November 11th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Do you find that typing on these ever bothers your wrists? I find on a “regular” laptop my wrists hurt, so I'm wondering if these would be even harder on people's wrists? Any comments, as compared to a “regular” laptop?
Thanks!
Jaime/Talking Books LIbrarian
http://talkingbookslibrarian.blogspot.com/
November 11th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
I haven't noticed a problem, but my main beef with regular laptops is that as I'm typing, my palms are resting on the trackpad, making the cursor jump all over the place in my document. This machine is thin and, when my palms are down and resting on something, it's the table on which the netbook sits, not the machine itself. Because of the thinness, the curve of my wrist seems to be less pronounced. Having said all that – almost all of my long-form typing happens at my desktop – other than session notes, I never spend a lot of time typing stuff up on the netbook…