My Acer Netbook. Review on Acer Aspire ONE Z1402 Notebook

I have used 3 different laptops in my career from 2001 till today. I started familiarising myself with a laptop ( HP Compaq ) which belonged to my director back in 2001. Later a co-worker bought his Acer Travelmate which we mainly used for all the gaming at free hours.

Atlast I got my own laptop Toshiba Satellite for outdoor presentations, classes, seminars and personal uses. All of them had a total hard drive of less than 40 GB and RAM of less than 512 MB. Mine had a HDD and RAM that was designed to be upgraded to higher figures later. It started giving some hard drive issues which I could not sort out myself, therefore sold it off in 2007.

After a break of almost 2 years (2007 and 2008), I felt the need of getting a laptop, preferably a smaller version called 'Netbook' as an addition to my Home Desktop PC. I always had a fancy eye for smaller notebooks which were very costly all these years. But now with the launch of HP Mini and Acer Aspire One and few others in the market, things have changed in favour of the customer. I considered Asus, HP mini and Acer for my new purchase.

Has anyone heard of a Laptop for Rs.15500 ? Not a second hand, brand new one with fresh smell and a cute leather type slip-on cover. Yes, my dream came true again when I owned an Acer Aspire One with Linux operating software on 20th January 2009, by paying Rs.15500/- (festival offer that was until 20th Jan 2009) with Bill and 1 year warranty !

Now coming to the hardware and software part. It has a 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB RAM and upgradable mother board for later additions of memory or RAM. It has 3 USB ports, Built-in Memory card reader (reads almost all formats like SD, Mini SD, MMC etc.), a buil-in Video camera and Mic on top of the display panel which is 8.9 inches. Also it gives another memory card slot for expansion of memory. Wi-fi is the main feature that will be always used by myself. I have a wi-fi modem at home, therefore I can carry around this little thing and do my browsing and chatting while watching TV, picture editing, listening to music, watching some video etc. I also consider this cute netbook as a back up for my important files that are in the desktop as 160 GB is not an easy area to fill in few years.

My usage experiences: I have developed a habit of taking a very comfortable position that is a mixture of sitting and lying on the plush sofa, use my netbook as a magazine and read through blogs, reviews, forums, news sites etc. same time being on Messengers for friends and clients to talk anytime they want.

Acer Aspire One Linux version has a built-in Messenger which allows you to log into AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google messengers in a single window, which is very space saving and user-friendly. It also has a Mail software where you can register upto 10 email servers, that keeps refreshing your Inbox at a set time interval with Mail alerts on screen.

Its the first time I am using a Linux based laptop/desktop PC. I am almost falling in love with this OS, as it has no complications nor virus threats as faced by Windows XP/Vista etc. With bit of googling, I was able to get into the system settings and do lot of personalisations of many areas. Overall, its a real Value For Money rated by many international review sites like cnet, osnews, zdnet etc. I am a very happy customer of Acer, it has revolutionized the pricing of laptops.

Only issue I find about this model is the battery life. It comes with a 3 pack battery which has a 2.30 hours of life. My issue can be solved with a 6 pack battery which is not yet available around. I am waiting for that. With the 6 pack battery, life will increase to 6 hours as read in review sites.