Dell est Mort; Viva L’Acer

Editorial Note: This is a rather old (Last September) unfinished post that I thought I should finally complete.

In order to keep up the blogging and everything else that requires a computer,  I ordered a replacement for the poor Dell laptop, which is now well into its death throes. It’s a small Acer Aspire 1410 with a full-sized keyboard and decent screen resolution (11.5″ diagonal and 1366 x 768). It’s definitely in the ultra-portable category, but it’s slightly larger and more powerful than the popular netbooks everyone is carrying around these days. In fact, it’s about an inch bigger than Jess’s Asus Eee PC, but with a much better screen. The only real downside with Jess’s little Asus is the pathetic 1024 x 600 screen resolution. Rumor has it that Microsoft was requiring such limited resolution from netbooks in order for manufacturers to continue selling Windows XP in place of Vista throughout most of 2009. I can’t confirm or deny that rumor, but it really is the only significant downside of the little netbook with the Intel Atom processor.

As for the Acer, it comes standard with 2 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron Core 2 Solo processor. The RAM can be upgraded to 4 GB, and the access is a breeze through the bottom of the laptop, but unfortunately the memory configuration is standard as a 2 x 1 GB 667 MHz DDR3. That means an upgrade will require wastefully replacing both DIMMs. As for the Celeron processor, it’s supposed to be a great deal more powerful than the Atoms, with similar active power consumption. The big difference is in the passive power consumption. Apparently the Celeron’s transistors are a bit more leaky than those of the Atom processors—requiring more power draw. The end result is a very healthy battery life of about 6 hours.

The keyboard on the Acer is a bit more resilient than Jess’s Eee PC, but the buttons are a bit less defined than the “chicklet” style keys chosen by Asus and made popular by the Macbooks. The end result is a full-sized keyboard that is a little harder to type on than the slightly undersized keyboard on the Asus, yet far more comfortable for typing than the much larger Dell. Bigger isn’t always better. The Acer offers both VGA and HDMI options for the video output along with 3 USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet connection, audio in and out via mini phono jacks, and an SD card reader slot. Sadly, the SD card reader doesn’t fully recess when a card is present the way is does on Jess’s Asus, but that’s a pretty minor complaint.

Aside from a few non-ideal aspects, the little laptop is quite impressive. Although Acer preloads the laptop with a ridiculous number of useless software titles, collectively they were pretty easy to remove. To date I’ve found the computer more than capable of streaming high-def video from the web, composing and playing multi-stave music with Finale, editing digital images with the Gimp, and of course blogging. I’ve found that stitching images together using Hugin (see an upcoming blog post for a rave review (Note: Already available) is faster than it was on the old Dell, but I’m a bit disappointed with the speed at which Nikon Raw images are batch processed using Nikon’s proprietary software. I’ll be doing a timed speed test with the laptop and a far more powerful desktop in the future in order to see if it’s a system issue or a software issue (I still haven’t done this and may never).

Regardless, everything else performs quite admirably for such a portable platform. It weights next to nothing and fits easily into a little Osprey shoulder bag I won as a raffle prize at the Boulder Bike Shorts film festival a couple of years ago. Despite the increased size and weight, I was seriously considering buying one of the new MacBooks. If they incorporated FireWire in the smaller format, I’d probably have spent the additional money; however, you have to step all the way up to the massive MacBook Pro series to get FireWire, and I wanted something lighter and more portable. In the end, I’m glad I saved both bulk and money by choosing the Acer.