Laptops Arena

When someone refers to an Acer mini notebook, most people will think about the Acer Aspire One netbook which is an 8.9 inch laptop that has sold a lot of copies worldwide.  A quick look through the specs will reveal an Acer mini notebook which is based on a 1.6 GHz N270 Intel Atom processor and 1 GB of RAM. Intel Atom processors are very common on netbook because such a machine is generally used for the most basic computing needs like surfing the internet and working on documents. This means that the components inside the laptop are weak.

<-336x280 Large Rectangle - center->

One of the main reasons why mini laptops have weak components is because certain sacrifices have to be made in order to get such a small laptop. When we are dealing with powerful components, they generate a lot of heat which could cause severe damage inside the unit. The laptop usually comes with a preinstalled version of the Windows XP Home Edition operating system with service pack 3. The display measures 8.9 inches in diagonal and it has a native resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The display is covered in a glossy coating which makes colors sharper and a lot more vibrating which eventually leads to an improved quality of the image. The horizontal viewing angles are excellent but movie watching with friends is not going to be great because of the reduced dimensions of the display. The total storage capacity of the hard drive is 120 GB, quite sufficient for such a small notebook.

The keyboard is generally a problem for such a small laptop but the 9 inch Acer Aspire One does not seem to cause much trouble when it comes to typing. The keyboard is stretched all the way to the edges of the notebook and so it looks that the laptop is actually smaller than it already is. There is no flex registered in the keyboard area which makes typing a real pleasure. The touchpad feels pleasant to the touch but it is awkward to use the left and right touchpad buttons which are placed on the left and right side of the touchpad.



As for the selection of ports and features, the unit comes with 3 USB ports, one multi format media card reader, a Kensington lock slot, a VGA pot, an SDHC storage expansion slot, an Ethernet port and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks. You always expect to get good battery life out of such a small laptop. With the screen brightness set to 60%, the wireless card enabled and used to surf the internet, the Acer Aspire One will stay on for about 2 hours and 23 minutes. For as low as $400, you get quite a good notebook, 2 card readers and a mini laptop which can provide you with good performance. Too bad there is no way to open it up and upgrade the main components and the cooling fan could be considered loud by some people but this is without a doubt one of the best netbooks on the market.

Acer notebooks have always been known for delivering good performance at a not-so-expensive price. One such example is the Acer Aspire 8940G, a unit which for $1329 manages to deliver power without making a hole in the family budget. Let’s take a quick look at what you get for this price tag. The Acer Aspire 8940G runs on a 1.6 GHz Intel Core i7-720QM and 4 GB of DDR3 RAM. The total storage capacity of the hard drive supports 500 GB and the graphics card is the nVidia GeForce GTS 250M with 1 GB of DDR3 video memory.

<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->

If you are looking for portable Acer notebook, this 18 inch monster is definitely not on your shopping list. The glossy display is very shiny and also very reflective. On the other hand, the colors are superb and the quality of the image is superior compared to other Acer notebooks. Leaving aside any matters of the display, the sound chapter has some interesting things to reveal. This 5.1 Surround system is going to offer incredible sound quality with the 5 integrated speakers and the Tuba CineBass Booster.

The keyboard of the Acer Aspire 8940G is pretty common, with no special or fancy design. The backlight will make typing in the dark an easy activity. The keys have good travel and even better response. They are very easy to press and the proper spacing between them makes it very easy to get used to it. We can say that the placement of the touchpad is a bit odd as it is located extremely close to the left side of the notebook rather than in the middle of the palm rest area. The matter finish that Acer has chosen makes the touchpad feel very pleasant to the touch and fingers seem to slide of easier. The touchpad is big and some people will never consider attaching an external mouse.

Let us see what there is to say about the selections of ports and features of this Acer notebook. The unit comes with 4 USB ports, one Ethernet port, an SDHC card slot, a Kensington lock slot, a Blu-ray optical drive, a VGA out, a HDMI port, a FireWire, an Express Card slot and the headphones out and microphone in jacks. You can never expect good battery life out a unit with an 18.4 inch display and which has some super cool components inside the unit.

If you turn the display brightness to 70%, activate the wireless card and set the Windows 7 power management profile to “balanced mode”, you can get about 3 hours and 10 minutes of battery life. I have to say that my 15.4 inch Toshiba can only achieve about 1 hours and 30 minutes on the same settings so the result of the Acer Aspire 8940G are not that low. With a huge touchpad and even an integrated Blu-ray optical drive (and its best friend: the HDMI port) I am beginning to wonder how come this notebook is so cheap. Is there something wrong with it?



The Acer One notebook, also known as the Acer Aspire One, is probably one of the most popular mini laptops on the market. With a starting price of  $329, this is also a wise choice for people that ore on a budget. This unit is based on the common 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor, a regular choice for netbooks. It also has 1 GB of RAM and a 120 GB hard drive. The Acer One notebook has a pleasant design, which a combination of black and blue, quite uncommon for mini laptops. The lid is covered in glossy plastics, fingerprint magnets, but they give this mini laptop a very pleasant aspect.

<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->

The keyboard is ok in size for an 8.9 inch notebook. There is no flex registered in the keyboard area and even if the keys will appear a little too small at first, especially when you are used to typing on regular sized keyboards, practice makes perfect and you will get used to the size of the keys. The touchpad of the Acer Aspire One deserves some special attention.

The surface of the touchpad may feel pleasant to the touch but the unusual placement of the left and right touchpad buttons is going to give users some trouble. Instead of placing these 2 buttons below the touchpad, for obvious space reasons, they have been placed on the left and right sides of the touchpad.

The display on the Acer Aspire One may be small, but the quality of the image is superior to many other netbooks. The screen is small. Or, better said, the display bezel is too thick, making the display look even smaller. It is going to be a torment having to read big documents and scrolling through big web pages. The horizontal viewing angles are great but yet again, how many people can really enjoy a movie when they are gathered around an 8.9 display. The speakers are ok. As you can imagine, the volume levels are not that high so don’t expect to throw a party and enjoy music coming out of the Acer Aspire One.

As for the selection of ports and features, the Acer One notebook comes with 3 USB ports, one VGA out, an Ethernet port, an SD storage expansion, a multi format card reader, a Kensington lock slot and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks. One thing we did not expect to get from such a small notebook is loud fan noise. If you are used to working into a quite environment, the Aspire One is not going to be your best friend.

Battery life is always important when you are dealing with an ultra portable laptop. With the display brightness set to 60% and surfing the internet with the wireless card enabled, the Aspire One is going to give you 2 hours and 23 minutes of netbook usage. Not the best performance as we really expected more. It does make a good budget mini notebook, even if the battery performance is not so great. However, we don’t recommend you consider using the Acer Aspire One as your primary computer.

The Atom processor is probably one of the weakest types of processors on the market. When we think about Atom notebook reviews, the first thing that should come to mind is definitely netbooks. Netbooks are the most common mini notebooks that use Atom processor because since the unit is so small, it must have weak components inside as better and more powerful components generate a lot of heat which is unacceptable in the cramped space of a netbook’s unit.

<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->

In order to better explain this issue, we have looked though some Atom notebook reviews and chosen the Acer Aspire One netbook for better understanding. This 8.9 inch laptop is based on a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and 1 GB of RAM. It has a hard drive with a storage capacity of 120 GB. When it comes to the performance of this mini notebook, you can never expect too much from notebook that have Intel Atom processors.



The unit is basically useful for the regular tasks like surfing the internet, working on documents and even watching a couple of movies. Netbooks were generally built for portability reasons as they are small and lightweight, permitting the user to carry it around without being disturbed about the weight or size of the unit.

Using integrated and low quality graphics card, it’s pretty common for these mini notebook not have any gaming performances. But what is the advantage of having an Intel Atom processor and other weak components for that matter. Well, we have already established that there is no way we can put dual core processors and nVidia graphics card inside a small unit as proper ventilation would become almost impossible and the heat output would lead to severe and quick damage of all the part inside.

Another huge advantage about having weak components is that you get much better performance out of the battery life. It is but a logical deduction that more powerful components will really stress out the battery while weaker components are automatically less demanding. The Acer Aspire One is not the best example of a netbook with great battery life but other models, like the Dell Mini 10 will almost be able to get you through a day’s work without having to connect the power adapter to the unit. In the case of the Acer Aspire One, the battery manages to survive only 2 hours and 25 with the display brightness adjusted to 60% and while surfing the internet with the wireless card enabled.



There is one logical explanation for the weak battery performance: this is a 3 cell battery. You can always pay an extra fee and go with the 6 cell battery which is bound to give you about 4 hours of netbook usage. The main advantage that the Acer Aspire One offers compared to all other similar laptops is that it has to be the cheapest Atom notebook on the market. The starting price of the unit is somewhere around $399 but it will add up depending on the extra features that you choose for your particular unit.

No matter how good a notebook model is and how much it has been praised by everyone, you can still be unlucky and buy a laptop model which has a factory problem. In time, it doesn’t matter if your laptop ran smoothly for months or years; some damage is bound to be produced sooner or later. It how the way electronics work, they will have some problems because the mechanisms “ware out”.
<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->
In this article, we are going to talk about some Acer Aspire notebook problems based on some user testimonial and forum posts. One user in particular said he owned and Acer Aspire 1670 for about one year and a half. This user is experiencing some trouble in charging the battery which means he has to turn off the laptop in order to achieve that. In the end, the battery stopped charging even when the laptop was turned off. Apparently, the power adapter is transferring power from the plug to the adapter but the battery does not charge.  This could be a problem with a bad DC jack. A solution could be plus in the adapter and move the plug inside the jack. Then try to notice if the LED flicker. While wiggling that power jack, you could try to press the notebook’s power button. If the notebook starts when pressure is applied to the power jack and the power plug than there is a problem with the power jack. A crack can appear between the system board and the positive connector of the jack. This causes interruptions in the charging process and can lead to permanent interruption of this process.  The main solution to this problem is to solder the power jack to the system board. Also try to turn on the laptop without the battery inside and with the power cable connected to a power outlet and see if that makes any difference.

If you are experiencing Acer Aspire notebook problems, you may want to take your laptop apart in some cases where you wouldn’t void the warranty if you do so. Here is how you can take apart an Aspire 5100. Like always, make sure that there is no power running through the notebook. Make sure you disconnect the power jack and take out the battery for the laptop. On the bottom of this laptop there are 2 panels: one of them offers access to the hard drive and the other to the wireless card, the RAM and the processor. Let’s say that you want to change one of these parts because it’s damaged. Here is what you have to do.



Flip the laptop so you can get access to the bottom side. The smallest of the 2 panels is the one that offers access to the hard drive and it is held in place by 2 screws which need to be removed. After you’re removed the screws, you can use a flat screwdriver to push the drive away from the notebook. This makes it easier to pull it out. Pull the hard drive very carefully to the right side in order to detach it from the motherboard and the lift it up. The mounting bracket needs to be transferred to the new drive you put inside the notebook. The memory module is held in place by two latches located on the left and right of the RAM chip. You need to spread them carefully because they are fragile. They must pop out at a 30 degree angle and then you can pull the RAM module by its edges. This Acer Aspire One supports a maximum of 4 GB of RAM which means you can add 2 memory modules of 2 GB each.



To remove the wireless card you must first disconnect the 2 antenna cables by grabbing the connector and unsnapping it from the one on the wireless card. There are two latches that you need to spread just like you did in the case of the memory module. Remove the wireless card by pulling it away from the slot. If you must remove the cooling fan, be careful to remove the 2 screws holding it into place first.  The fan cable needs to be then disconnected from the system board. Just remove the fan by lifting it up. If you were experiencing over heating problems or any kind of fan problems, make sure you check and see if there is any dust accumulated between the heat sink and the fan. Dust can prevent the air from circulating normally inside the notebook and if the unit is not properly ventilated, in the end it produces serious damage to the internal parts.



If you wish to gain access to the interior of the notebook by lifting the keyboard, here are the steps you must follow. With the use of a flat screwdriver, carefully lift the keyboard bezel. You must handle things with care because force can cause cracks in the bezel. Next, you must remove the 2 screws which are securing the keyboard. Lift the keyboard with extreme care because there is cable underneath which keeps it attached to the motherboard. When you lift the keyboard up, you will notice that flat ribbon cable which is attached to the motherboard with the help of a connector. The black tab can be moved with your fingernails. Just move it 2 mm in the direction of the LCD and then you can carefully remove the ribbon cable. Be careful because if you break the tab, you have to replace the whole motherboard. That about does the trick, you can remove the keyboard from the notebook.



Always make sure that if you mess inside your notebook this will not void the warranty. You should also have proper tools if you want to do repairs on your notebook even if, in most cases, you have most of the necessary tools lying around your home. You need patience and (sometimes) a bit of tech or mechanical knowledge just to make sure you don’t mess things around in there.