Aspire One vs. EEE PC 901

[scottro]

I know that at least one member has both. I had the Aspire One, and like many, got the black screen of death. (Supposedly fixed in later models) so returned it. I plan to replace it. Originally, I was planning to replace it with the 6 cell battery Aspire One. It comes with XP, but it's simple enough to simply wipe it and replace it with Fedora.

The other option I'm looking at is the EEE 901. That is about $80-$100 USD more. It's slightly more difficult get Fedora on it, but from what I've seen, still relatively simple.

The advantages it seems to have are:
802.11n wireless. (Probably not a big deal either way to me--this is a netbook, and I will probably use it for relatively simple tasks. My current home router only does b and g, and upgrading to an N will cost a minimum of around $80-$100 USD.)

Ease of upgrade. Again not that big an issue. If I get the Acer, I'll stick with the 1 Gig of RAM, which should be more than adequate for my use. (Acer has made upgrading RAM involve completel diassembling the machine, to the point of removing the rubber feet on the bottom.)

A 4 GB SSD that runs well, for the O/S and a 16 GB one that is slow, for other files.
The Acer I have in mind has a 160 gig hard drive. Again, for the use I will make of this, the difference in storage space is probably unimportant--the 8 Gig SSD that came with the first Acers was horribly slow with write speed, making an installation of Fedora with an upgrade literally take hours. I assume such an upgrade on this faster 4 gig SSD of the Asus wouldn't be anything like that. I am also guessing that upgrading to the Acer's hard drive would be more or less similar to other machines.

I don't know how much quieter the Asus SSD will be when comparied to the Acer hard drive.

One down side I have heard about, though I should be able to test this before buying as there are various stores in the area carrying the 901, is the keyboard. I don't know if the Acer keyboard is as much better than the Asus as has been claimed.

Anyway, I'm wondering about people's impressions, especially those who may have tried both. Was the quality of the ASUS generally better? Or is the higher price simply due to the name, and perhaps the N wireless card?

Ease of upgrade

[sideways]

this could be as bad as gnome v kde

The acer keyboard is superior to the asus eeepcs (701s, 901s) and the 120gb hard-disk linux acer models are great value but the asus eeepc have these advantages:

1. smaller (fits snugly in my coat pocket, acer aspire one doesn't)
2. better speakers, good enough to use with usb tv adapters and watching movies (dvd/mpeg4) (I need to use headphones with the acer)
3. boots from sdhc cards (this is crucial for me, I run F8 on an 8GB sdhc card, may not be a huge issue for others)
4. ram expansion slot is easily accessible! (not an issue if you get the 1gb acer model)

and, the most important,

5. The celeron eeepc models (@900mhz) are have much better performance (with slightly reduced battery life). If you want to do any audio work or run some decent games, I have found the atom based netbooks not up to the task.

In fact, I find the current atom performance quite miserable, so I would recommend getting the asus eeepc 900 (celeron based), however, you may consider battery life more important than raw performance.

The atom processor has in order execution, which means you get horrible stalls and contention (eg when the cpu is waiting for a memory fetch), I'm hoping the dual-core models due next year will be a huge improvement.

[scottro]

Ah, that throws something else into the mix. Heh, more confused now.

Thank you. I hadn't realized that about the Celeron. On the other hand, my needs would be pretty tame, though I might have to run a Windows VBox guest from time to time, if for example, I were traveling and wanted to access my company's network through VPN.

Thank you for a detailed answer.

[scottro]

I see that Acer is now offering a 16 GB SSD with 1 GB RAM of the Linux version.

I guess in some way, that's paying a little attention to the user complaints. One complaint was the difficulty of upgrading RAM. While they haven't fixed that, they've at least given more RAM.
They ignored the complaints about Linpus Lite, as far as I know, I imagine it's the same as it was. They make no comment, that I can see, that the 16 GB SSD is any faster than the 8GB one--no one was complaining about the lack of space, simply the horrible write speeds making (in combo with the Atom processor and low memory) many things, such as upgrading a Fedora or other Linux install, horribly slow.

So, I'd say they're not really trying to sell that one--probably some sort of lip service to something, so that they can say, oh we offer Linux too, in a configuratoin that, especially judging from our first model, is almost guaranteed to be completely ignored.

'Twas ever thus.

They'll also probably ignore the fact that many who will buy the MS version, having learned about their SSDs from the first models, will just wipe XP and put Linux on it.

Then, they'll drop it, saying, Well, we offered it but it didn't sell.