I bought an Acer Aspire One from Woot today. I’d been thinking about picking up a netbook for a while now. I was in Costco earlier this week, and they had both an HP Mini and the Aspire One for sale. Costco’s price wasn’t bad ($330 or $350, I think), but Woot’s $260 was low enough to convince me to actually go ahead and buy.
Looking around at what’s out now, the standard netbook config seems to be an Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, and a 10 inch screen, all running Windows XP. Most of that is fine, but I really wish I could have gotten one with 2GB of RAM, or found one that’s easily upgradeable to 2 GB. Most of the netbooks either aren’t upgradeable, or they require some serious disassembly to upgrade. The Aspire One seems to fall into the latter category. CrunchGear posted a video how-to on upgrading the Aspire One, and it’s pretty scary. If I’m understanding the situation correctly, the model I’m getting has two 512 MB chips in there, and one of them can be replaced with a 1 GB chip, for a total of 1.5 GB. My main worry with the RAM is that I’d like to be able to run Windows 7 on this thing eventually, and I don’t think 1 GB is going to be enough for that.
This guy has a write-up on how to install the Win 7 RC on an Aspire One. It doesn’t sound too difficult. I may look into partitioning the drive and experimenting with it. Long term, I guess I need to decide if I want to buy the $50 Win 7 Home upgrade for this machine, or just keep it on XP. The $50 thing expires on July 11, I think, so I need to figure that out soon.
[ UPDATE: This post at the Woot forum makes it sound like it’ll actually be pretty easy to upgrade the RAM in this thing. Cool. ]