[ubuntu-uk] EeePC 900A vs Acer Aspire One

[Alan Pope]

2008/11/14 Rob Beard <rob at esdelle.co.uk>:
> The cheapest option is the 8.9" Asus EeePC 900A N270 with 1GB Ram and an
> 8GB SSD.  It doesn't say what CPU it has (I presume it would be the
> 1.6GHz single core Atom?).  This one in white or black is £194.
>

The 900A is confusingly the same spec as the 901 (1.6GHz Atom) but in
the case of the 900.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC#Specifications

0.3MP camera, not the 1.3MP that the 900 has.

> The next option up is the Aspire One A110L with 512MB Ram and an 8GB
> SSD.  This also mentions N270, so presumably this is the same CPU as the
> EeePC 900A?
>

It is.

> Now I was leaning towards the Aspire One due to it having two SD card
> slots (I figured I could pop in 2 x 8GB SD cards for extra storage space
> - not that I need much anyway on a laptop/netbook).

Leaning towards the Acer for a feature you won't actually use? :)

> The one thing that
> is putting me off is forking out for another 512MB memory (I wasn't sure
> how many slots they have).
>

My 900 has 1GB of RAM and I'm now running a cut-down version of Ubuntu
on it. It works fine. I guess it would be a bit more sluggish with
512MB, but probably would work okay. I think the 701 I had was fitted
with 512MB and running Xandros I never really had any complaints. RAM
is fairly cheap at the moment so you could always upgrade later. It
only has one slot.

> So I was wondering generally what they are like.  Does the battery last
> long, what are they like performance wise?
>

Depends what you do with it. My co-worker uses his Aspire to write a
book on the train each day so he only uses Openoffice writer and finds
that fine. Mine runs Ubuntu ok, not as quick as the stock xandros
install but not bad.

> I'm not expecting the same sort of performance as a Core 2 Duo but I
> could do with something speedy enough to run Java applets (LogMeIn
> remote control software) and Firefox/Thunderbird.
>

So long as you're not opening a bazillion tabs with flash and lots of
Java then you should be fine.

Cheers,
Al.