I have to admit that I was energized when I purchased my Acer Aspire One netbook. I shopped and looked until I found exactly the one I wanted. I purchased an Acer Aspire One 10.1″ with the 6-cell battery. I purchased the computer from Costco for a terrific price of $350. I was ready to travel!
I have a wonderful Gateway laptop but it is heavy. I really wanted a computer that was smaller and even more portable than my laptop. I understood that the netbook would not be used for editing photos, heavy duty multi-tasking, etc.
I played with the Aspire One for around 2 weeks and was wowed with its 6-hour battery life. It was great to not have to carry a charger around with me. The keyboard took a little bit of getting used to but after time I became very proficient on it.
This past week I took the Aspire One with me on a road trip. I had several blogs that I needed to write while I was on this trip and thought the Aspire One would be portable and easy to pull out when I had a few minutes to spare.
On my first night in the hotel I hooked up the Aspire One to the internet and got to work. I first noticed that the netbook was sluggish during the first 1/2 hour of use due to the McAfee software running in the background. I had noticed this during previous use but did not have time issues. Now it was a problem. I went and did a few things and came back after McAfee had finished its processes. I then opened Notepad and Wordpress in Firefox. My research began in earnest and proceeded to cut and paste my information from several locations and then typed and putting the blog together.
The Aspire One was very slow to switch back and forth between screens. I also had difficulties with my Wordpress dashboard. One half of the screen overlaid the other side. This made editing and manipulating the information very aggravating. I was not a happy blogger!
After using the netbook on my travels I believe I will go back to using my heavy old laptop. Although the size and the battery life is impressive I found doing actual work on the netbook very awkward. Maybe if applications like the ones used on the iPod Touch were available it would make the netbook more attractive. I found it difficult to use Twitter when the screen was truncated and lopsided.
I remain hopeful that as technology advances I will find a computer with a small footprint and the ease of use of my desktop.
