The Digital Life?! Part 6 _Say Hahlo to My Little Friend!

As most of you know, my Gateway laptop of 2 years and great service went kapuht earlier this week. Replacing it was going to have to wait a while, since I need to focus on other stuff right now. Then I found the Acer Netbook. Something said this was an ideal time to try out one of these new machines. Besides, small tech and gadgets are ALWAYS cool in my book. ;) (How long 'til that Cobalt pocket watch/pda/cellphone thing comes out again?)

The Acer does a good job. Yes, the small keyboard takes some getting used to and yes, you'll probably want an external DVD drive for it. I like the 2 SD card slots for expansion and it's great for iTunes (Yes! I can finally catch up on LA Ink!). It even runs MS Flight Simulator 2002 pretty well on the high settings. Not bad at all for a machine not designed for gaming. Yes, Second Life is pretty slow, even with what appear to be dual core 1.6ghz processors. No worries, this thing covers all the truly necessary things VERY well. I can't complain, since it saved the bacon here. Acer even includes a travel-sized optical mouse with this multi-tasker.

And I just realized the humor in a theme park enthusiast buying an Acer computer. (ACErs are members of the American Coaster Enthusiasts group [http://www.aceonline.org/] and completely unrelated to Acer Co. Ltd. [http://us.acer.com/acer/home.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&sp=page2&ctx2.c2att1=0&CountryISOCtxParam=US&ctx1g.c2att92=453&acond24=25&ctx1.att21k=1&CRC=4168717908] that makes computers.)

On a random side note, my first PC in 1996 or 1997 was an emerald green Acer Aspire pizza box with voice recognition. It also was one of the early machines to sport an AMD processor verses a Pentium. This was also just before or right about the time Celeron processors hit the computing scene. The Acer monitor from that set lasted until around 2004 or so. Long time for any monitor, let alone one that survived a couple moves.

Here are the particulars on the Aspire One Netbook:

• 1.6 ghz processor(s)
• 1 gig ram
• 160 gig hard drive (about 140 after system resources and recoverypartition)
• Win XP SP3
• Generic and just enough graphics card? (nothing raging)
• 8.9 TFT-LCD screen (most bright and sharp)
• 3 USB 2.0 ports
• 1 multiple type memory card slot
• 1 SD slot (Basically 2 SD slots)
• VGA out
• Headphones out, mic in
• Ethernet and Wireless B/G networking
• Webcam
• MS Works
• MS Office 2007 60 day trial
• McAffee Anti Virus trial
• Adobe Acrobat Reader* A Windows DVD player/MPEG support
• Win Media Player

At the end of the day, I'm just bloody relieved to have a working computer and back-up system.