Acer Aspire AS1410-8414 Reveiws for you

Well, after offhand mentioning this model to them, my parents oddly decided to buy one (very unlike them!). I set the machine up for them (*lots* of crap/demoware to uninstall) and here are my impressions.

First, the good: A lot of these are the reasons I was attracted to the machine in the first place. First it’s a Core2 processor and *not* an Atom, which are achingly slow (buy this one, not the Atom variant!). I mean, a few browser tabs and you’re done. Next, good screen, generally good sturdy-enough build and attractive all around. Keyboard is full size! And key layout is fine. Built-in webcam is cool. 6-cell battery is a *must* for any laptop, netbook or otherwise. Intel 4500 graphics chip means watching videos is no problem. The thing is fast enough to run stuff like Office pretty well. The AC adapter is small.

Basically, it’s *almost* an ultraportable-class machine. But the "bads" are why it’s still very much a netbook.

The bads: The keyboard is cheap, plasticy and sucks for typing. Key size and layout are fine, just the travel and feel are awful, making it hard to touch-type even after many, many hours of practice. The trackpad is also pretty bad (on the upside if you have tap-to-click enabled, the default, you don’t have the problem of phantom taps when your palm touches the pad when you’re typing). The trackpad buttons are very hard to push down, and the trackpad gestures don’t register well. The speakers are tinny and awful, virtually unusable except for system beeps. I spent a solid 24 hours removing all the crapware and doing updates … and this was just to get Vista up to date … Windows 7 is a free upgrade, but that’s pending delivery and obviously more work to upgrade. Would be so much better if this just came with a clean naked Windows 7 install (or my preference, Linux … but let’s not go there). 250 GB HD is large … but slow — obviously this is only a netbook, but programs and stuff would load and run much faster with a non-bottom-of-the-barrel 5400 rpm disk.

So, if you are deciding between this and a $300 netbook, pay the extra hundred and get a much more usable machine than an Atom toy. (Or maybe wait for the Atom 4xx series chips and see how they stack up against this guy’s Core 2 Solo 1.4.)

But, if you are thinking of using this for even occasional work … I encourage you to try one in person and see if you can really live with the keyboard and trackpad. I mean if you test all the netbooks out at a store with decent selection, I’d have to think you’d find even one of the $300 ones will type better for you … and there are companies like Lenovo, Fujitsu and HP making netbooks now that normally produce good notebook keyboards. Not that I’m vouching for them, and for sure the first Dell Mini 9 and 10 had awful keyboards with keys mapped to nonstandard places, that’s why I suggest you actually try a machine first if you type.

Personally I wouldn’t go near a $400-800 6-lb. "laptop" but that may be more your speed. Even my 4-year-old Powerbook G4 makes this thing look like an unpleasant plastic toy by comparison. Sony and some others have come out with ~$700 netbook-like machines that don’t suck if you have money to burn. Personally I just use my smartphone for web etc. on the go so I haven’t bitten on any netbook yet.

I still give it 4 stars since it’s well above average for a netbook. For netbook things it’s fine, and having a screen big enough to really browse the web with is nice. For the net, for watching movies, for Skype on the webcam, it’s cool.Buy Acer Aspire AS1410 8414 Lowest Price, Order Now! [Click Here!]

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