25/06/2009, 04:32 AM
Had been weighing up whether to get an old laptop vs a netbook and I decided on the later.
Got an Acer Aspire One D250 for AU$500, with an AU$80 cashback. Registered for the cashback, but the thing couldn't verify my ID thing so I'm going to have to print off some poo poo and send it in to them >_>
Specs:
The camera's quality looks really bad, even though 0.3MP is like 640x480 which IMO is enough for basic images. But meh, never got this for the camera.
Can't use Memory Sticks in the card reader without an adapter I think, cause the slot's too big. Don't have any Bluetooth devices, so that doesn't mean much, for now at least.
Have thought about getting a 6-cell, but a 3-cell sounds like it can last around 2-4 hours which should be enough for me in most circumstances (unless I change my usage pattern). Still, the cheapest netbook with a 10in screen and 6-cell I could find was around AU$560.
I actually really wanted a 12in laptop, but cheap ones of this size appear to be very rare >_> (not much between 10in and 14in).
I imagined this would be a pain to use, but to my surprise, it's better than I thought. Keyboard is small, but I could use it. Don't like the lack of a native Home/End key (I use this rather frequently; IMO, make the PrintScrn / Pause buttons non-native - I bet you really don't use those keys that much). Touchpad is a pain though - I'd personally prefer the little mouse nubs. I guess I could get used to using touchpads however. Screen is small but still viewable-ish.
Thing is light at just over 1kg - can easily hold it with one hand. Smaller than an A4 shit of paper (in it's pouch, it's slightly larger) and only about an inch thick.
The glossy screen is highly reflective and looks like to work a wonder under direct sunlight... or not (screen shades?). Why anyone makes glossy screens for a highly portable laptop, I don't know...
As expected, the default XP install is full of poo poo, so I would obviously put my own install of Windows on. But this is where my adventures with the netbook began.
tldr version: took me ~2 days to get Windows working on this thing...
Anyway, haven't really installed any apps on it yet.
Probably should just go with a Linux distro, but wanted to use something a little more familiar.
Got an Acer Aspire One D250 for AU$500, with an AU$80 cashback. Registered for the cashback, but the thing couldn't verify my ID thing so I'm going to have to print off some poo poo and send it in to them >_>
Specs:
- Atom N270 CPU
- 1GB DDR2 RAM
- 160GB SATA HDD
- 10.1in screen
- WinXP Home
- 3-cell battery
- Bluetooth + WiFi b/g
- Card reader
- 0.3MP camera + microphone
The camera's quality looks really bad, even though 0.3MP is like 640x480 which IMO is enough for basic images. But meh, never got this for the camera.
Can't use Memory Sticks in the card reader without an adapter I think, cause the slot's too big. Don't have any Bluetooth devices, so that doesn't mean much, for now at least.
Have thought about getting a 6-cell, but a 3-cell sounds like it can last around 2-4 hours which should be enough for me in most circumstances (unless I change my usage pattern). Still, the cheapest netbook with a 10in screen and 6-cell I could find was around AU$560.
I actually really wanted a 12in laptop, but cheap ones of this size appear to be very rare >_> (not much between 10in and 14in).
I imagined this would be a pain to use, but to my surprise, it's better than I thought. Keyboard is small, but I could use it. Don't like the lack of a native Home/End key (I use this rather frequently; IMO, make the PrintScrn / Pause buttons non-native - I bet you really don't use those keys that much). Touchpad is a pain though - I'd personally prefer the little mouse nubs. I guess I could get used to using touchpads however. Screen is small but still viewable-ish.
Thing is light at just over 1kg - can easily hold it with one hand. Smaller than an A4 shit of paper (in it's pouch, it's slightly larger) and only about an inch thick.
The glossy screen is highly reflective and looks like to work a wonder under direct sunlight... or not (screen shades?). Why anyone makes glossy screens for a highly portable laptop, I don't know...
As expected, the default XP install is full of poo poo, so I would obviously put my own install of Windows on. But this is where my adventures with the netbook began.
Spoiler for retarded long story:
Firstly, there was an Acer recovery image making utility thing, which you can burn a recovery disc. The great minds at Acer made the application only work by actually burning the disc, despite that fact that none of its netbooks actually has an optical drive. The concept of a transferable ISO clearly never came to their minds.
Anyway, I decided to keep an image of these recovery things in case I wanted to restore the thing to factory defaults for some reason (perhaps selling). So installed a virtual CD burner and tried to get the thing to work. It did, but was rather retarded. There are two images - a recovery disc, which is over 5GB and a drivers+apps disc which is over 1GB. So I stuck in a virtual DVD+R DL but Acer's app flatly rejected it. So I tried the standard DVD-R - after burning half, the app would seem to try to verify the first image and end up in a loop of asking for a blank disc (and when presented with one, would eject it and ask the same thing). But did manage to get the drivers disc. Then I managed to find an option in Virtual CD v9 (the virtual burning app I was using) to change the capacity of the DVD-R, so I upped it and managed to get the recovery image.
Okay, with that through, since 160GB (around 149GB usable) is plenty of space, I decided to keep their XP install just in case there was some necessary application on there which I wasn't aware of, and had to use in a short period of time. So my idea was the shrink the main drive to around 10GB and install my other OSes on other partitions. So pulled out the HDD and plugged into my SATA-USB casing. Was doing something on Windows, didn't want to restart, so started VirtualBox with an Ubuntu LiveCD and bridged the USB drive across and used GParted to shrink the volume. Bad decision - not sure if it's the USB connection, or going through a VM, but the process was SLOW, like, 5+ hours to shrink the thing...
Whilst it was doing its thing, I thought I may as well strip a copy of Windows 7 whilst waiting. For some reason, vLite won't run in my XP64, so fired up a second VM. For some reason, the VM decided to freeze, so I killed the instance. Problem was that it decided to stay in memory (the window was gone though) and decided to hog a CPU core, and couldn't be killed (was running as a service - probably why). Didn't want to kill VirtualBox altogether, since the other VM was still shrinking the volume, so left it.
Came back a while later, and it seems the VM doing the shrinking decided to give way too, so I had to kill the whole process and ditch the partition I was trying to save.
Okay, now to Windows 7 stripping. It seems the build7260 x86 image I got was a little dodgy - doing pretty much anything with vLite would stop the installer from working (By the way, that took many tries to realise that). My Win7 RC1 image could be stripped a bit though.
So I tried using GImageX's "Apply" option to install the stripped Win7 without going through the installer, but I kept getting "Disk read error" when booting. Tried installing XP, after rebooting from the textmode portion of the installer, I'd get the same thing.
After a while, I suspected the drive to have something about it, probably the cancelling of the resize operation did something with the partition table. Wanted to keep Acer's "PQSERVICE" partition (some 7GB inaccessible partition - I'm guessing used for backup purposes?; Windows can't do anything with it), but in the end, I got pissed and just nuked the entire partition table from the drive and started afresh.
Tried installing XP again, it failed on reboot, but with a different message. Figured it out pretty quickly - Acer's boot from secondary HDD seems to change the ordering of drives, thus the boot.ini on the netbook's HDD is pointing to "rdisk(1)" where it really should be "rdisk(0)". Unfortunately, XP's recovery console sucks - can't do any text editing, so had to take out the HDD and back in the main computer to edit the INI file. After all that, I did manage to get XP to install.
So then I went to try Win7 again. Applied the image with GImageX and managed to boot into the second stage of the Win7 installer - but it just kept failing. Gave up with the stripping thing and just tried installing a stock Win7. Managed to get it to work, but as expected, ran like a slug. Tried the dism registry hack to see if I could remove any packages, but got access denied errors when trying to remove anything. Couldn't be stuffed to look further, so decided to nuke the install and go back to XP.
Except it seems that Win7 had some fun and destroyed the XP bootloader - putting it back in didn't do much - just got some other missing file error. Weirdly enough, my XP installer on my second USB HDD decided not to work, so I decided to nuke the netbook drive again, and recreate the XP installer on the secondary drive.
And finally, managed to get a working computer... >_>
Anyway, I decided to keep an image of these recovery things in case I wanted to restore the thing to factory defaults for some reason (perhaps selling). So installed a virtual CD burner and tried to get the thing to work. It did, but was rather retarded. There are two images - a recovery disc, which is over 5GB and a drivers+apps disc which is over 1GB. So I stuck in a virtual DVD+R DL but Acer's app flatly rejected it. So I tried the standard DVD-R - after burning half, the app would seem to try to verify the first image and end up in a loop of asking for a blank disc (and when presented with one, would eject it and ask the same thing). But did manage to get the drivers disc. Then I managed to find an option in Virtual CD v9 (the virtual burning app I was using) to change the capacity of the DVD-R, so I upped it and managed to get the recovery image.
Okay, with that through, since 160GB (around 149GB usable) is plenty of space, I decided to keep their XP install just in case there was some necessary application on there which I wasn't aware of, and had to use in a short period of time. So my idea was the shrink the main drive to around 10GB and install my other OSes on other partitions. So pulled out the HDD and plugged into my SATA-USB casing. Was doing something on Windows, didn't want to restart, so started VirtualBox with an Ubuntu LiveCD and bridged the USB drive across and used GParted to shrink the volume. Bad decision - not sure if it's the USB connection, or going through a VM, but the process was SLOW, like, 5+ hours to shrink the thing...
Whilst it was doing its thing, I thought I may as well strip a copy of Windows 7 whilst waiting. For some reason, vLite won't run in my XP64, so fired up a second VM. For some reason, the VM decided to freeze, so I killed the instance. Problem was that it decided to stay in memory (the window was gone though) and decided to hog a CPU core, and couldn't be killed (was running as a service - probably why). Didn't want to kill VirtualBox altogether, since the other VM was still shrinking the volume, so left it.
Came back a while later, and it seems the VM doing the shrinking decided to give way too, so I had to kill the whole process and ditch the partition I was trying to save.
Okay, now to Windows 7 stripping. It seems the build7260 x86 image I got was a little dodgy - doing pretty much anything with vLite would stop the installer from working (By the way, that took many tries to realise that). My Win7 RC1 image could be stripped a bit though.
So I tried using GImageX's "Apply" option to install the stripped Win7 without going through the installer, but I kept getting "Disk read error" when booting. Tried installing XP, after rebooting from the textmode portion of the installer, I'd get the same thing.
After a while, I suspected the drive to have something about it, probably the cancelling of the resize operation did something with the partition table. Wanted to keep Acer's "PQSERVICE" partition (some 7GB inaccessible partition - I'm guessing used for backup purposes?; Windows can't do anything with it), but in the end, I got pissed and just nuked the entire partition table from the drive and started afresh.
Tried installing XP again, it failed on reboot, but with a different message. Figured it out pretty quickly - Acer's boot from secondary HDD seems to change the ordering of drives, thus the boot.ini on the netbook's HDD is pointing to "rdisk(1)" where it really should be "rdisk(0)". Unfortunately, XP's recovery console sucks - can't do any text editing, so had to take out the HDD and back in the main computer to edit the INI file. After all that, I did manage to get XP to install.
So then I went to try Win7 again. Applied the image with GImageX and managed to boot into the second stage of the Win7 installer - but it just kept failing. Gave up with the stripping thing and just tried installing a stock Win7. Managed to get it to work, but as expected, ran like a slug. Tried the dism registry hack to see if I could remove any packages, but got access denied errors when trying to remove anything. Couldn't be stuffed to look further, so decided to nuke the install and go back to XP.
Except it seems that Win7 had some fun and destroyed the XP bootloader - putting it back in didn't do much - just got some other missing file error. Weirdly enough, my XP installer on my second USB HDD decided not to work, so I decided to nuke the netbook drive again, and recreate the XP installer on the secondary drive.
And finally, managed to get a working computer... >_>
Anyway, haven't really installed any apps on it yet.
Probably should just go with a Linux distro, but wanted to use something a little more familiar.
![[Image: acer-aspire-one-d250.jpg]](http://www.pmptoday.com/wp-content/uploads/acer-aspire-one-d250.jpg)