Patatoa

I have several mobile computers and my favorite to use is easily the oldest and oddest one. My Acer Aspire One ZG5 has been with me since I graduated college, possibly longer. While it's fallen in and out of my daily driver over the years, I come back to it since it is a pleasure to use. This is in spite of many things working against it. But I highly recommend it if it fits your niche.

The specs aren't much to speak of these days. It has an Intel Atom dual core at 1.6 Ghz. 1.5 GB of memory, 250 GB SSD which of course is an upgrade I did myself. There are more features that I'll get to, but on-paper that's the full list of note. You may notice the paltry amount of RAM as the next reasonable upgrade. Unfortunately, the Atom architecture allows a max of 1.5 GB. Alas.

The Aspire One was made for Windows XP. I was able to get Windows 7 on it at a point in time, and it ran well with the aero features disabled. Of course, you don't purposely run old hardware for daily use just to run Windows. You want to run some nerd-cred OS. I have the 32-bit edition of Arch Linux installed with dwm as my window manager and it is a dream. The low overhead of this set up and the limited specs of the machine really compliment each other. I run Arch and dwm on my other laptops, but the set up is essential on my Aspire One.

In 2020, the Aspire One handles the web about as well as it did in 2009. Web browsing is a bit slow to start, but after a minute or so it runs well enough. Most websites run with no problem. Even YouTube runs better than you imagine. The other thing to note is that web browsing eats up about half of the available RAM. As long as you watch how many tabs you have open, and flex patience as pages load on occasion, casual web surfing is totally possible. It can play your music and video files just fine provided you use headphones. I'm not sure if it's the mixer or the hardware itself, but the speakers are quiet. You can even get away with some emulation. NES games run fantastic and SNES games run well too. I like to play SNES JRPGs on 2x speed (or faster) but the Aspire One is not up to that additional ask unfortunately.

obligatory neofetch flex

That's a lot of shortcomings, so what makes it my favorite machine? First is the form factor. It is very small — Even by today's standards. It's easy to carry and comfortable to use in lap. Because it's a real laptop, I can lay down, plop it on my belly, and still see the screen — unlike my Surface. I can lay it sideways and not have any screen-rotation or keyboard deactivation shenanigans. It travels well and it's small enough to fit on one knee, so I can pull up just about anywhere.

The screen is also of great value. While it's not OLED, the colors are vibrant. Unlike many of the value Thinkpads touted these days, it has the hard screen on it which gives it a higher budget feel. The screen is 8.9 inches. Though small, it boasts a lot of horizontal space with a very wide aspect ratio. This is very useful for one task the Aspire One shines brightest — writing.

Writing on this is a dream for everything I stated above: the screen is lovely, its ultra-portable and suited for the task. Because web-surfing is just inconvenient enough you are less likely to derail a writing session. It has a real keyboard which I haven't talked up yet, but it too is fantastic. Maybe not suited for bigger hands, but perfect for me. The keys are flush and reasonably spaced. There's no click, of course, but there is a satisfying tap and enough travel that it feels like you're typing on a real keyboard. I've even done a bit of coding on here.

The netbook isn't a thing anymore, and that is a mistake. The format was a bit ahead of its time. It came out just as hardware shrank, but software ballooned. With today's ARM processors, or mobile focused x64's fitting in phones and single-board computers, we could have beastly netbooks. Unfortunately, now were stuck with either larger, more cumbersome laptops, or tablets with mobile OSes. Instead of strapping orthopedics to tablets like cases with stands and bluetooth keyboards, we could be using 21st century, fully-featured, netbooks.

I'm sure you've seen this laptop around in the past, and maybe you even have one, or a netbook like it, lying around. Hopefully, I've persuaded you into giving the Acer Aspire One, and netbooks as a whole, a shot in 2021. Better than a tablet and better than today's larger-if-fancier laptops. Thinkpads have been the meme for years. So much so, that they're not even cheap anymore. These things still are. They're easy to upgrade and easy to use. Let's make the Aspire One the new meme for 2021.