By 
The Acer Aspire One is an affordable ultra portable notebook which has entered the sub-notebook market to compete with the well known Asus EEE PC. With an MSRP of $350, originally $100 more during the inital release, the Aspire One makes an excellent laptop for web browsing, email, and entertainment while on the go. Plus, it’s hardware configuration isn’t lacking the slightest bit either!
Acer Aspire One Specification:
- Processor: Intel Atom N270 1.60 GHz
- Memory: 1GB DDR2 (533MHz)
- Chipset: Intel Mobile 82801 GBM
- Video: Intel GMA 950
- Storage: 2.5 inch 120GB HDD
- Card Readers: SD Card (1) & Multi-Card (2)
- OS: Windows XP Home Edition
- Display: LED 8.9 inch 1024×600 (WSVGA)
- Webcam: 0.3 megapixel camera
- Wireless: Acer 802.11b/g
- Ports: 3 USB, LAN 10/100 Mbps, VGA, & Audio in/out
- Battery: 24W 2200mAh 3-cell Li-Ion (3 hours)
- Input: 84-key Keyboard & Touchpad
- Weight: 2.19 lbs with 3-cell & 2.78 lbs with 6-cell
- Size: 9.8″ (W) x 6.7″ (D) x 1.14″ (H) inches
The Body: 3.5/5 stars
With the lid closed, the Acer Aspire One has a stylish glossy finish over its blue body. The bottom of the notebook is made of one piece of plastic except for perforations for air flow and a small cutout for access to the RAM. The external build is elegant, robust, and has a tiny footprint. The inside looks fairly good with a black keyboard and a blue surrounding, however there’s a large gap that appears between the lower and upper portion of the notebook which just looks unusual. There are two shinny orange pieces on the hinges, which stand out too much and takes away from the look in my opinion. The screen is surrounded by a highly glossy black frame which provides a nice contrast in some situations, however can become irritation when light reflects back at you. Most of the components are in the right places and are easy to access. Overall, the durability, feel, and looks of this notebook won’t be an issue.
The Screen: 4/5 stars
Like most sub-notebooks, the Acer Aspire One has an 8.9 inch display with a screen resolution of 1024×600. This resolution is just large enough to be able to view and use most standard-sized websites. I ran into occasional issues with some windows for certain applications being too large so the bottom or top wasn’t visible, but it wasn’t too bad. The LED backlit display is quite bright, sharp, and the colors produced are pretty vibrant. The viewing angles were fairly good. The colors faded much faster with slight change in either vertical direction; however horizontal angles remained intact for longer. The screen looks great for watching movies or viewing photos.
Operating System: 5/5 stars
The Aspire One is running Windows XP Home edition which is probably the most widely used operating system today. So there shouldn’t be any complains there. The machine boots up and is ready to go in about 55 seconds. Launching applications such as Mozilla Firefox takes just a second or two. With 1GB of RAM you can have plenty of applications running at once without any issues. Just about all the applications I use on a regular basis are available for download, but if you have any programs that come on a CD or DVD, you’ll need to find an external USB drive to install them. I was also excited to see that Acer had already upgraded XP to Service Pack 3, which will save everyone the time and hassle of having to install too many updates. Having run XP on a machine with a 900 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM, I can testify that XP is a very flexible OS and will run without any issues on this laptop.
Keyboard and Mouse: 3.5/5 stars
The keyboard is large enough to use comfortably. With a bit of getting used to, you can begin to type pretty fast without any issue. I was also glad to see that the keyboard didn’t have any weirdly sized or misplaced keys as I have seen on many other sub-notebooks. The main issue I had with the usability of the notebook was the awkwardly placed left/right click buttons. The left/right click buttons have been moved to the left and right sides of the touchpad, instead of placing them below. It was quite awkward to use and I often found myself clicking in the wrong spot only to realize that there weren’t any buttons there. Most people will begin to tap the touchpad to initiate a left-click, but will have no choice but to reach over to input a right-click. If Acer had moved the keyboard up just enough to allow room for normally positioned left/right click buttons, the Aspire One would have been much easier to use.
Speakers & Headphones: 4/5 stars
The speaker is located on the bottom-side of the Aspire One. It can get loud enough and remain fairly clear, but are nothing to brag about. The main issue would have to be that everything sounds quite muffled. Everything sounds different based of whether it is being held in your hands, on your lap, or on a flat desk. As for use with a headphone jack, the audio quality is excellent and will offer exactly what you would expect out of a laptop with a built in sound card.
Microphone & Web Cam: 3/5 stars
The Aspire One has a built in microphone and webcam making it a great little VoIP device. I made a few test calls using Skype over a WiFi network and the results were good. The microphone didn’t pick up to much background noise and the web cam was just clear enough to make out faces. The webcam performs quite poorly under poor lighting conditions. Both components are low quality pieces of hardware, but will do the job for communicating when away from something better.
Ports and Expansion: 4/5 stars
The Aspire one has a fairly good selection of ports. It unusually has two memory card readers, one just for SD and the other is a 5-in-1 reader. The reason for two was originally intended for the model with the 8GB SSD model since it allowed expanding the storage onto the SD card using the Linux OS. However they carried it on over the HDD version running XP, which happens to be quite unnecessary. On the front of the notebook you’ll find a switch to toggle WiFi on or off. The right side has the audio input/output, two USB ports, and the multi-card reader. The left side has the power port, VGA port, fan exhaust, ethernet port, another USB port, and a SD card reader.
Performance: 5/5 stars
The Aspire One is a fairly fast notebook. It actually has better specifications in just about every category than the 14 inch Sony Vaio I had been using up until just about two years ago. The HD Tune benchmark tool displayed an average of 49 MB/s data transfer rate, which is excellent. The wPrime 32 CPU test took about 124 seconds to complete which is better than most other sub-notebooks with other processors. The Aspire One is fast enough to do just about all the basic things you would need to do on your laptop on a daily basis. It obviously shouldn’t be used for video editing or gaming, but is great for multimedia playback, internet apps, email, chatting, note taking, and much more.
Battery Life: 4/5 stars
The Aspire One I reviewed only had a 3 cell battery; however 6 cells are also available. Unfortunately a 6-cell will protrude from the notebook. Benchmarks always vary, so I put it to the test in a real-life situation. With WiFi enabled and the screen at half-brightness, I was able to get about 2 hours and 40 minutes of juice out of it on average. I was mainly writing articles, browsing the web, or streaming media the majority of the time. The hours I got might not be entirely similar to what others may receive based of whether they are using hardware intensive applications or not. The battery life was around what other notebooks such as the Lenovo S10 receive, however I do wish it could fit a 6-cell without sticking out like the Asus EEE 900 does. Despite that, it’s fairly good amount considering that it’s got a standard HDD.
Conclusion
After having a chance to play with a couple of other main stream sub-notebooks such as the EEE 900, the Acer Aspire One is currently my favorite. Especially impressive since due to the fairly powerful hardware specs while it’s MSRP is now just $350 for the model in this review. And as I mentioned before the notebook doesn’t lack on looks either. However, my opinion might soon change as Dell and other companies are beginning to roll out more sub-notebooks with competitive specifications and pricing. Just about everything from the operating system, the hard drive space, and speed was satisfactory. The main downsides are probably the awkward positioning of the mouse buttons and the battery life. Overall, most of you folks who are looking for a cheap portable laptop will get exactly what you are looking for and won’t be disappointed with Acer’s Aspire One.
Buy Now: Best Buy $350 | Amazon $400 | Circuit City $330 (SSD Model)
Links: Acer Aspire One | Wiki Page
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I followed Kaelainne’s advice and turned of the automatic updates since I dumped my core and reset my AAO back to it’s original settings. So far I haven’t had any problems.
Just got my acer — love it but the mic doesn’t seem to pick up sound. I can hear everything just fine. Any suggestions??
Anyone can help?…For some strage reason the built in web cam on my aspire one is not longer working….anyone knows what could be the problem?
you need to just reset your settings to DMA for the stuttering problem. Usually it happens when you install a new program that overwrites it, or this can also happen from too much standby or sleep mode. just go to this website http://winhlp.com/node/10 and do the quick “click here to just fix the problem” link at the top. run the program, you dont need to save it and just execute it. will fix the stuttering for just about every acer aspire one but you may have installed a program that overwrites the default windows dma manager and then you’ll have to hunt that one down and find it. best wishes.
G-d bless you! I have been looking for a fix for my Acer Aspire One’s stuttering for a couple of weeks.
THANK YOU THANK YOU! This sound problem has driven me crazy for some time now. Your solution worked beautifully!
Hopefully this will help with some people’s sound issues. I’ve been trying hard to not wipe my drive or reset it back, 115 GB is a lot to back up not to mention the hours of program installations. To give credit, the comment by threecsix led me to this answer, although the fix in the link did not work for me on the right track. My computer runs XP. Short explanation- uninstall your primary IDE cable and reboot. Long explanation.First go to device manager which can be reached by right clicking on the My Computer icon and clicking properties OR Start>Settings>Control Panel>System. Once open click on the Hardware tab, then Device Manager Button. The next window shows a tree. Look for “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers” and click on the ”
+” next to it. That will open a sub list one of which will read “Primary IDE Channel.” Right click it and select Properties. New Window will open, click on Advanced Settings Tab” Under “Device 0” the last line will read “Current Transfer Mode:” with a text field next to it. If it reads “PIO Only” in the text field you have the problem I did. If it reads “Ultra DMA Mode 5” or anything involving DMA, this might not be your issue but this technique might still help.
Sorry I don’t know why it posted that comment before I finished it. IF the line reads PIO Only, that is what you want to change and the “easiest” way is to let the computer do it for you. Click Cancel on the “Primary IDE Channel Properties” window and you should now be at the “Device Manager” window. Right click on “Primary IDE Channel and click “Uninstall.” It will pop up a “Warning” in a windows titled “Confirm Device Removal” Click OK. Now Restart your computer. I held the power button until it turned off but a Restart should work as well, I just didn’t want to repeat the process because this method is making Windows listen to you. You will have to reboot twice and they will take FOREVER. Explanation. Your computer is fine it’s Windows causing the issue. For some reason it hit what it thinks to be errors when reading your drive so it changes to a mode with less errors but doesn’t distribute processing loads so the processor has to do more thinking. So instead of your motherboard army doing all your tasks it only wants the General to do the work. That’s what PIO mode is. This method makes windows “forget” that the drive even existed. However because windows is not the first thing to load on your computer, it will still load. At which point windows sees the drive it is installed on says” oh hey something new, let me install things so I can read it”. Which is why it takes forever, and when it’s done the first time it will ask for another reboot. Give it another reboot and this time I did just Start Menu>Restart. Hopefully this helps people out without having to revert to previous or wiping their drives clean. However mine still was a bit sluggish and so my next comment will be what I did next.
you have provided great information, it worked for me!!
Oops. I’m a little scatter brained I don’t post often. To make sure that fixed the issue follow the steps again and make sure on the window that had “PIO Only” make sure it now says something about DMA, mine said “Ultra DMA Mode 5”. If it does not Make sure the line above it which has a pull down arrow reads “DMA if available” and then redo the process.
I don’t know if this will work for everyone or if it’s a result having Alcohol 120% installed. For those who don’t know it’s a fairly simple program that lets you have Virtual CD/DVD drives. A plus for this computer because of it’s lack of a disc drive. I just keep my copies on an SD card I keep in the front slot. Right click My computer then click properties. This will pull up a window titled “System Properties” Make sure you are on the “General” tab, if not click it. I noticed the problem here. My computer is currently all factory hardware (internally), I haven’t even added RAM to it yet so if you haven’t done that your’s should read Very similar. The bottom right of the windows reads something like
“Acer Incorporated
Intel(R) Atom(TM)
CPU N270 @ 1.60GHZ
1.60 GHz, 0.98 GB of RAM”
The problem I noticed is that the last line read
“768 MHz, 0.98 GB of RAM”
So with my sample of 1 computer your last line should read “1.60 GHz, 0.98 GB of RAM” the 1.60GHz, is the important part. That is the speed your RAM is working at, and slower RAM means slower computer. For the complete novice MHz is less than GHz. 1,000Mhz = 1GHz. The explanation form here, might not apply to you because I think the program Alcohol actually has something to do with this part, so if you read less than 1.60 GHz and get completely lost in this explanation I’m sorry but I don’t have another solution to this. However, prior to this step my computer was playing music without skipping as long as I didn’t overload the computer, and even then the skipping happen FAR less often and didn’t even last half a second (my computer would skip and drag a second of sound out to 5-10 seconds sometimes). Now for the RAM fix I did. From the window that has the last line reading “??/, ??GB of RAM, click the “Hardware” tab, then “Device Manager” Button. New Window titled “Device Manager” pulls up. Now here is where you stay with me or I loose you-Look for “SCSI and RAID Controllers” Click on the “+” next to it. I had 2 listings pull up and I uninstalled both of them. (Right click, click uninstall, click OK on the windws that pops up.) Reboot your computer. Wait and wait , and wait. When windows loads Get back to the “System” window, that reads the GB of RAM (reread if you don’t know how to get there.) And then see if it now reads “1.60GHz, ???GB of RAM. Note the number before GB will vary, and that is just due to the manufacturing, Nothing is identical, so even if you buy two “identical” 1 GB chips one might show 1.01GB and the other might show 0.97GB. Hope this helps people out if not I’m sorry, but I still have 1 more issue and if I could get some feedback for that it would be great. On your “Device Manager” window. If you have “SCSI and RAID Controllers”, especially if you’ve never touched the program Alcohol 120% could you send me and email listing what the fields under it are when you click on the “+”. One of mine has an explanation point and I haven’t figured it out yet. (Yes before and after all of this so it has nothing to do with my sound). My address is DM.Kenn@gmail.com. Thanks to those that do, no problem for those I helped, and take care everyone.
Dust: Thank you so much for your solution (uninstalling primary IDE and rebooting). It worked like a charm! The folks at Acer wanted me to completely reformat to see if it was a ‘software or hardware problem.’ I’m glad now that I didn’t….just didn’t want to go to all the hassle of reinstalling contacts, calendars, appointments etc etc. Your advice was invaluable.
I got the acer aspire one for my birthday and now it says i dont have a web cam when i had one before so i am totally confused could someone help me
if im not mistaken, the “CPU N270 @ 1.60GHZ
1.60 GHz” part actually means its a dual core processor.
Nope, the atom is a single core processor. Intel is working on a dual core atom processor for launch probably late 2009 or 2010. The reason the CPU in your netbook along with anyone else using an N270 Atom showing dual in the task manager is because it virtualizes it for better performance.
I had a problem with the audio just like everyone else.
I thought that I needed to send it back for repair but since I found this website it worked out great. Thanks…
I followed the instruction http://winhlp.com/node/10 and rebooted and problem was gone. I recommend it to everyone who has problem with audio being skipping. Thanks again
I like to restore my Acer Lap Top 6920 to manufacturing settings since it has spyware that block my internet explorer.
I don’t had the CD’s and Alt F10 or F11 does not work.
I did this with some steos in the past but I don’t remeber those now.
I appreciate if some one help me with this.
Thanh you
thank you so much Dust. i followed your instruction and purged the lagging from my little sisters laptop. i was getting so FRUSTRATED. thank you thank you thank you
i have a notebook Acer -aspire one- i canot use the webcam. It say please check the device connection and make sure that the device is not used by another application or user. please can you help me.
Thanks Dust!!!
Just removing the IDE channel and rebooting fixed my problems. I had “use DMA if Available” but it said I was using PIO mode.
Under “Administrative Tools|Performance” I was getting spikes to 100% every 5-7 seconds in Avg. Disk Queue and Processor time. Now there’s a 10% bump every few seconds but that’s it. Mine was so bad even the Windows Startup sound was crackling and stuttering!!
This is the category of “dumb stuff that shouldn’t break” and Windows gives you no warning it happened and no easy way to fix it (removing devices is still non-user friendly)
Note on drivers.
To download drivers Goto this link.
http://bit.ly/1ZcReU
Click Netbook, then Aspire One.
The next list is a list of model numbers. Mine is on the bottom of the computer, on the sticker nearest the power port.
I like to download all of them and put them on a flash drive or a memory card. So I always have them on hand.
Dust: Bless you. I spent the last 24 hours wondering what had crippled my poor Acer and doing everything I could think of, and that script fixed it in 2 minutes. I know four other Acer users, some of whom have had this problem and some of whom haven’t, but they’re all going to get the script and keep it handy should PIO rear its ugly head. One of them wants to send you a fruit basket already. ;) THANK YOU!!!
An update. It’s been a number of months but PIO took another stand. Which I promptly fixed with the same method. I also just did a RAM upgrade. If you’re thinking about it: a word of warning. Don’t attempt it if you’re not used to taking things apart. The entire computer has to be taken apart (at least on the models with the mouse buttons on the sides). I also had to reopen and close it a couple time to get everything lined back up and functional.
I agree, if you aren’t too computer savvy don’t attempt to do so. However if you do know a decent amount about computers, it isn’t too difficult of a task. Just take a lot of photos of each step you remove something so you know exactly how to put it all back together. I just wish upgrading RAM was just one easy plate on the bottom. It’s pretty lame where the RAM is located on this model!
Hi,can anyone help my webcam no longer works. when you click on the webcam this comes up (No supported video capture device found!)my netbook is a AOA 150 running linux..
I’ve never used linux so I am not sure how to comment. All I can advise is try uninstalling and reinstalling drivers. If that doesn’t work the cam itself may have failed. Beyond that, any help forum for linux with device malfunctions should give you some kind of insight. Sorry I can’t be of more help.
Can anyone help me please, my webcam doesnt work anymore it says something like “error #54” help :(
Try this. Go into Device Manager, locate and then right click on the camera and uninstall it. Then right click anywhere on the list of devices and select “scan for hardware changes”. That should reinstall the camera and it should work. Let me know what happens.
My acer runs XP. Not long time ago all the sounds which it provides became jerky, and I tried many cleaning, repairing programs, but it didn’t work. Can anyone offer a special music and video player program for this computer? I stopped antivirus programmes also, but the music was still jerky – and for more, not just music, but the signal sounds too.
Anyone can help me…?
I have an acer aspire one and everytime i try the webcam it sayd “no supported video captyre device found. Does it mean the webcam has fallen off? Could I get some held please!!!
Hello, my newish ACER aspire one will not boot in “normal” mode, it hangs in the “XP” part and just sits there.. i have to force it to shut down. It will boot in “safe” mode tho… anyone else have a similiar issue, and how do i fix it? thanks