I picked up a wonderful new sub-notebook over the weekend, but this one has some history behind it which is worth explaining first.
When I bought my Acer Aspire One 522 a little over a year ago (November 2011, see original blog post here) I came very close to returning it because the screen resolution was only 1024x600. But even in the first few hours of using it, and loading Linux on it, I was so impressed with it that I decided to keep it, and I've been pleased with it ever since.
Last week I saw an Aspire One 725 on sale here, for 399 CHF (about £280), and the specifications said that it had the new AMD C-70 CPU (my AO522 has a C-60), more memory and a larger disk. Now, there are some good reasons to get a new system!
I went to look at it, and found that one of the major electronic shops here also happens to be offering a discount on all Acer laptops, so I ended up buying one for about 325 francs (just under £230). That's a heck of a good deal for what has turned out to be a heck of a good sub-notebook. (Note to Swiss readers: the Acer discount is on offer until Sunday, 24 March) The specifications of the unit I bought are:
- AMD C-70 1GHz Dual core cpu
- 4GB DDR3 memory
- 500GB SATA disk
- Radeon HD 7290 graphic controller
- 11.6" 1366x768 display
- Realtek 10/100 wired network adapter
- Broadcom 4313 WiFi b/g/n adapter
- HDMI and VGA ports
- 1 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0 ports
- SD/MMC/xD/MemoryStick slot
Wow, that is very impressive, especially at that price! I can only see a few negatives:
- No Bluetooth (I can live without it)
- No gigabit wired network (only 10/100) (I seldom use wired anyway)
- Preloaded with Windows 8 (Sigh)
Be careful about these specifications, and the price: there is another model of the Aspire One 725 also on sale here, at a slightly lower price, with only 2GB of memory and a 320GB disk.
That might be sufficient for those who don't need quite so much memory and disk space, and with the 15 percent discount that model is going to be under 300 francs. The different models are probably identified by the alphabet soup that follows the 725 model number, but deciphering that is beyond me; check the specs on the box carefully to be sure which you are getting.
When I unpacked it, I was immediately struck by the size and weight (small and light). I consider this to be in the same category as the HP Pavilion dm1-4310 (see my blog post about that model), and the difference is clear:
Aspire One 725: 28.5 x 20.2 x 2.3cm, 1.2kg
HP dm1-4310: 29.2 x 21.5 x 3.2cm, 1.6kg
That's a big difference, and when you are holding them both in your hands you can really see it, and feel it. Don't get me wrong, I still like the HP dm1 a lot and it has a lot going for it. But if your criteria is size and weight, the AO725 is the clear winner. Oh, the AO725 also seems to run much cooler, and the cooling fan is on much less often than the HP dm1. Now obviously, the C70 cpu is much less powerful than the E2-1800, and thus produces less heat, so this isn't a surprise, but it is worth mentioning.
More pros and cons on the physical design and appearance: It is actually a bit nicer than the Aspire One 522, they have put a bit more effort into addings some shaping and curves around the edges, and around the keyboard. It has a real touchpad with real buttons, not the dreaded "ClickPad" (which would have ruled it out for me anyway). The keyboard is probably the only thing I would complain about, the keys are absolutely flat, and the feel is a bit mushy. The touchpad "buttons" are a single bar positioned on the front edge of the palm rest, which I don't much care for, but they seem to work reliably.
The variety of ports and interfaces on this unit is pretty impressive as well. First, it has an HDMI port, which I use when connecting to a television to show pictures, AND a VGA plug. It has one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports, which is becoming more important as more 3.0 devices are becoming available. It has a memory card slot which will take not only SD/xD/MMC cards but also Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro, that's a nice touch and still not all so common for notebooks in this class.
That's enough about the hardware, let's move on to the operating system. It came preloaded with Windows 8, which needed to be booted and configured - that took quite a long time slogging around, but eventually it finished.
Then I needed to make a rescue copy, because I am pretty likely to wipe Windows off this machine, either intentionally, accidentally or out of disgust...
The Acer Rescue Manager will make this backup to a USB stick, rather then DVD disks, which is nice. The sales clerk in the shop said that I needed at least a 16GB stick for this, and the Rescue Manager program said the same. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be large enough, because when I tried it with a 16GB stick, it ran until the progress bar got a fraction from then end, and then just stopped. No message, no error, no crash, no stop, no nothing.
Then I tried with a 32GB stick, and that worked just fine. Sigh. Once Windows was loaded and configured I went in to the disk/partition management program and told it to shrink its partition as much as possible. That gave me back about 230GB of the disk, which is more than enough for the moment. The disk has a GPT partition table, so it is not necessary to fiddle with "Extended Partitions" and "Logical Paritions", and I didn't have to worry that Windows and Acer had already "used up" the only four available "Primary" partitions. Nice.
The Aspire One 725 has a UEFI BIOS, with Secure Boot enabled by default.There are a couple of Acer-specific things that are important to know here. First, the boot-select option is disabled by default, you have to to into the BIOS setup (press F2 during boot) and then change that to enabled before you can boot a Live USB stick.
Second, you can only disable Secure Boot if you have set a BIOS password. Yes, I really meant that - go back and read it again if you want, I'll wait. Grrr. Who does that make sense to? What is the logic there?
There is certainly nothing else in the BIOS, or the BIOS help screens, or the documentation that came with it which says that this is the case. I was only lucky enough to know it because someone mentioned it in the comments to one of my previous posts about UEFI booting. So, if you want to disable Secure Boot, you first have to define a BIOS password. Sigh.
Well, this might not be all that critical anyway because both openSuSE 12.3 and Fedora 18 have UEFI Secure Boot compatible Live images, so you can boot them without having to disable it.
That was what I did, booting and installing both of those, and it all worked without a hitch.
This was where things got really fun and interesting, both openSuSE and Fedora installed perfectdly, including setting up UEFI Secure Boot on the new installations, and they both recognized, configured and supported everything right out of the box.
Starting at the top, with CPU frequency stepping, shown to be working with the lscpu command. I am happy with the FOSS Radeon drivers, so I didn't bother trying to load the proprietary AMD (fglrx) drivers. The wired and wireless network adapters work just fine, and it connected to my home WiFi with no trouble. The Fn-keys for volume up/down/mute, brightness up/down/off, touchpad disable/enable and even Sleep/Resume all work! Oh, and speaking of the touchpad, two-finger scrolling works.
http://www.windowsanyway.com/
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