As many of you know, two weeks ago I purchased an Acer Aspire One netbook. I bought it just in time for NECC 2009. At that time I posted about my decision to buy a netbook rather than an inexpensive Toshiba notebook at roughly the same cost. After two weeks after my initial review of the netbook I can still confidently say that the netbook is worth every penny I spent.
When reading this evaluation of netbooks, bear in mind that I do 97% of my work online. Over the course of the two weeks since I purchased the Acer Aspire One I've only opened my old laptop four times. Of those four times, only once did I "have" to use my full size laptop. That instance was when I was using Google Earth. The ten inch screen on the Acer Aspire One is just a touch too small for accessing the full functionality of Google Earth.
The three cell battery (6 cell wasn't in stock when I was shopping) has consistently lasted for close to three hours when running just Firefox. When I run TweetDeck and Firefox simultaneously the battery life decreases to roughly two hours.
Overall, during the last two weeks using a netbook for all of my daily tasks like writing blog posts, watching video, and creating videos on Viddler has been a good experience.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Acer Netbook After Two Weeks
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4 comments:
Thanks for the update. I bought the Dell Mini a few weeks ago but had to return it because the mouse kept sticking. I then purchased the 8 inch Acer and LOVE it. I like it better than the Dell, as well. It seems to run faster. I'm mostly running Firefox and Tweetdeck and it's smooth as butter. I've had to use my work laptop once only because I had to pull up a document off the hard drive. It felt/looked so huge on my lap. Anyway, thanks again for your posts on this!
I don't have a netbook myself, but I'm curious about how you envision them working out in a classroom. We have some carts of full size laptops now, but we may like to add another class set. What do you feel would be the trade-offs between buying a cart of 24 full size laptops verses the cheaper netbooks? I teach elementary school and I'm particularly interested in using them with Kindergarten or First graders.
Kathy Benson
http://techintcoach.blogspot.com
If I may leave a note for Katy - one simple answer to that is learning to use a keyboard effectively. Let's face it, the regular size keyboard is a stretch for kinders & first (I also teach at that level) - with the netbook we can teach proper finger placement, etc. in the late 90's we were able to purchase kiddie-size keyboards to accomplish this, but I haven't seen them around for a few years till the netbooks last year. I use mine everyday, with my old fat adult fingers =:-0
I received an Acer Aspire One netbook a few weeks ago from Acer through a special program (http://educationaltechnologyguy.blogspot.com/2009/06/acer-one-netbook-review.html) and I love it. Mine has a 6 cell battery and lasts for 5-6 hours with Google Chrome and OpenOffice running. I am getting used to the smaller keyboard and use it when I teach at other sites (paramedic, EMT, and CPR classes).
My classroom at the high school has the small desks with the side desktop, so a netbook fits much better than a full size laptop. I've been able to use every web page, web application, and software that my students would use in my class. I'm working on getting funding to purchase a classroom set of them for next year because they are so useful.
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