First up on the group test bench is the Acer Aspire One.
It costs barely £230, which is frankly bargainous for the spec of the machine you get - 1.6GHz Intel Atom, 8GB SSD storage and 512MB of memory, with a custom Linux-based operating system.
Is this a worthy challenger to the Eee PC? Watch the video and find out.
My wife just bought one of these (the 120GB hard drive and Windows XP version) as a second laptop and it’s really quite awesome. It hits the sweet spot in terms of screen size, keyboard layout, weight, and price though the mouse takes a little getting used to. The new 6-cell battery comes in really handy, too.
Its quite easy to install Skype on the Acer. Just go to the Skype site and download Skype for Fedora 8. It will install straight away.
You’ll need to enable ‘right click’ on the desktop, as this is disabled by default, to see the Skype launcher from the Xfce menu.
Go to http://www.acer.com/aspireone/support/files/connect.html and download skype and the other programs acer are releasing, these give you a icon in the main home screen as well.
I have the 120Gb version with 1Gb RAM (In white!) and have installed Vista Ultimate on it.
So far this has been superb, and runs like a dream.
Fantastic value for money, and a solid bit of kit.
Just about to install Windows 7 BETA on it - Will report back!
TM2AM
Are you loving your job, or what! Thanks for showing us how these netbooks function, how they compare to one another, and (literally) how they stack up!