Acer Aspire One
I picked up one of the $200 netbooks on sale this week at Target - and I am really impressed with the build quality. This is not a cheaply put together little machine (well - it is - it just does not feel that way) - it looks great with a shiny navy-blue to black fade on the lid, there is not a lot of flex to the keyboard or wobblyness to the laptop in general. If you are looking for a nice little laptop, and be aware it is little - typing is not as easy as a full-sized laptop, this is a very nice, very cheap, and very capable machine.
Normal readers can leave at this point - because now I am going to explain how to get XP onto an Acer Win7 netbook - for those people like me who frustratedly searched the web only to find solutions like custom wrappers for XP install disks and "buy a USB floppy disk drive"... yeah. Sure. Right after I figure out how to get Windows 95 installed on my smartphone.
Turns out that Acer has a great support site for all the XP drivers, so you can get everything working... once you install XP.
Which doesn't work, because XP natively can't see SATA drives, so when you put in your install CD, it tells you you dont have a hard drive. Problematic. All of the solutions I read online were ridiculous or ridiculously complicated.
And then, poking around in the BIOS, I found a setting which switches your hard drive from SATA to IDE - likely because this netbook was also sold with XP on it. This makes installing XP crazy easy, because you just switch it to IDE, install, then go to the Acer site and download all the drivers. Presto.
Next up - what Counterstrike and Diablo II look like on a 10.1' screen with 8mb of video memory.... yeah...
Normal readers can leave at this point - because now I am going to explain how to get XP onto an Acer Win7 netbook - for those people like me who frustratedly searched the web only to find solutions like custom wrappers for XP install disks and "buy a USB floppy disk drive"... yeah. Sure. Right after I figure out how to get Windows 95 installed on my smartphone.
Turns out that Acer has a great support site for all the XP drivers, so you can get everything working... once you install XP.
Which doesn't work, because XP natively can't see SATA drives, so when you put in your install CD, it tells you you dont have a hard drive. Problematic. All of the solutions I read online were ridiculous or ridiculously complicated.
And then, poking around in the BIOS, I found a setting which switches your hard drive from SATA to IDE - likely because this netbook was also sold with XP on it. This makes installing XP crazy easy, because you just switch it to IDE, install, then go to the Acer site and download all the drivers. Presto.
Next up - what Counterstrike and Diablo II look like on a 10.1' screen with 8mb of video memory.... yeah...
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