I just wanted to make a little recommendation to anyone out there who needs an ultra-portable laptop. If you ride a motorcycle and need a little computer for on the road, this just might do it.The Acer Aspire One. This is one seriously small computer. Measuring in at only 9.8 inches across by 6.7 inches deep by a little over an inch tall, and weighing in at only about two pounds, it is easy to dismiss as a cool toy, reminiscent of the Cybiko.
But this is no toy. The one I bought has 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and a 160 GB hard drive. The OS? No Vista here! Windows XP Home edition. It has built in 802.11g wireless networking, RJ11 socket for ethernet, three USB sockets, external socket for a monitor, mic and headphone jack, an SD Card socket and finally a multi-socket that will read SD cards and quite a few other things.
Oh. And mine is blue.
But they don't all come in one flavor. There are many different configurations for this laptop. Some have solid state hard drives (i.e. no spinning disk and quieter but less storage), more or less RAM, different processor speeds, and for those Linux lovers, several flavors come installed with Linpus Linux! I have read that installing other flavors of Linux on this machine is no problem at all.
Since this is such a small, inexpensive and simple unit, there is even a growing community of hardware hackers for this PC, doing things like home control, touch screen, media system control, security... and on and on...
The drawbacks... No CD or DVD drive, smaller screen size, and the speakers pretty much suck.
For $350, not a bad deal.
So, if you are looking for a little, rugged, inexpensive, powerful laptop to throw in your saddle bag or backpack, you might want to give this one a look.
PK, coming up, my notes from Day 3 of my trip - Eagle, Colorado to St. Francis, Kansas. Ahhh!!! The plaines!
4 comments:
I received an Asus eeePC as a Christmas present this year and I'm pretty happy with it so far. It's even better once you blow away the default Xandros Linux and install something reasonable like Debian. Mine has a 4Gb SSD, so space is at a premium. Switching to Debian took me from a 3.6Gb default install to a rather svelte 700Mb. (Yes, it really had only 400Mb of free space out of the box!)
Like you, I'm hoping that a tiny netbook will be useful in my future motorcycle travels.
Hi Stacy,
I was going to try SuSE but before I knew it, Visual Studio and MsSQL and MySQL and OO about a dozen other geeky things just seemed to install themselves! :-)
Ah, so you have an SSD. I would imagine it is nice and quiet. How is the battery life with an SSD?
Disk space - I really appreciate Linux for being able to let the user trim just about everything down to bare-bones minimum.
I've been looking at this computer and thinking of getting one. Should be a great tool for the road and probably more
Just came across your blog and very good reading so far! I recently bought an eeepc as well for a trip I did back in Oct..I ended up putting Fedora 10 on it a few weeks ago and it's performed wonderfully.
It's really nice to just be able to pop it into the tank bag and go..It has a 16G SSD as well so no spinning drives to worry about. Good luck with the rest of your trip!
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