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Aspire One
BoBoDaClown
Member Posts: 57
Hey guys,
I'm planning on buying the Aspire One tomorrow.
It's specs (off memory):
1.6ghz CPU
1GB Ram
16 GB SSD
Windows XP
I want it to play divx movies, emulators (dosbox, megadrive, etc) and older PC games (saw some footage of people playing Morrowind which would be cool, but games like Baldur's Gate would be enough).
This is to be my 'away from home', mucking around, toy.
My question: Will games run fine from the SSD? I have heard people have complaints about the write speed of the 8gb SDD, but I have no idea if that would effect gameplay? Or if the complaint is still valid for the 16gb SSD.
Unfortunately, I cannot afford the hard drive version, for I can get the above Aspire pretty cheap.
Any advice would be appreciated!
Thank you
BoBo
Comments
SSD is supposed to be much faster than a hard drive. What is the video card on that? I'm pretty sure the processor and video card will be a problem.
How much is that?
Pretty crappy computer...
First off its not a computer. Its a cheap netbook. It can actually play many games on it. Though dont attempt WoW since the hard drive is to small. Id recommend one of the Asus systems. They tend to have larger hard drives. In fact I saw someone running around playing WoW at the Hong Kong airport on a 8 inch netbook. Blew me away how well it ran and how good it looks. The guy had painted the outside with a sweet orc. Suffice it, it was his Wowbook hehe. Perfect in my opinion.
Hey BoBo, I would hold off if I were you. I looked at the acer but actually went with the MSI Wind.
2ghz same processor (only netbook which lets you over clock) regular 1.6ghz atom.
160gb HD
2gb ram
Win XP
I picked out up for $300. Not sure what price range your looking at though but check out some reviews.
The 1.6 ghz atom is equivalent in effeciency as the Pentium IV processor. So you should be able to play 2D games well with it and pre-2002 games. The read speeds on SSD will always be good, but the write speed depends on the SSD. For a laptop and below 32 GB its probably worse then a magnetic drive. I would say get the MSI wind because you are going to be paying a premium for that SSD, and with only 16GB there is barely any space on it.
I doubt it will be able to play movies beyond 640 resolution or 128KB/s. The reason I say this is because I own a dual core pentium laptop with an internal graphics card and it also has trouble playing higher resolution movies. If you want it to play movies then I would hold off this year as nVidia and AMD mature thier netbook solutions. Particularly the ION platform if its ever transfered to the netbook arena. Also AMDs laptops are going down considerably in price. When you can get a $500 laptop that has full HD playback why bother with a netbook that costs nearly the same?
This is wrong.
The Aspire One uses a really cheap SSD, it gets like 30mbps reads, and it WILL annoy the crap out of you. even XP will be sluggish.
I highly recommend you hold off until you can afford something with a hard drive. I have the HD Aspire One and love it.
Hey guys,
Late reply I know, but thank you for the advice.
I went and bought one. I thought I would give you guys a run down of how it goes.
First of all let me say I am really pleased with it. I did tweak it slightly to get better performance with windows xp, but once I had done that xp runs fine and games already ran sweet.
Morrowind: Only played a little, but runs fine - obviously low graphic settings.
Project 64 - 64 Emulator runs smooth as, haven't tried the PS1 one yet.
Other weaker emulatora all run well.
I am going to be putting nwn, civ 4, baldur's gate, Planscape Torment etc on it. Civ 4 is the one that will test it, but I think it will be fine - I can upate this post if anybody wants to know.
I haven't tried it, but I have heard of people running WOW and EVE on these machines - althought I would imagine they would really struggle the minute there are many players around.
Again, thanks for the help!
BoBo
This is wrong.
The Aspire One uses a really cheap SSD, it gets like 30mbps reads, and it WILL annoy the crap out of you. even XP will be sluggish.
I highly recommend you hold off until you can afford something with a hard drive. I have the HD Aspire One and love it.
Oh well, didn't know SSD's could go that slow.
Anyways, I'm interested in knowing how well it'll run those games, would you mind updating us?
Just to let you know Drag:
I have been playing nwn and Civ 4 on the aspire.
NWN: I have been playing this multiplayer with my partner. It is running pretty well. I have resolution 1024x600, 64meg texture, and I think all the other graphics options on the lowest. It runs ok - in quiet areas it run fairly smoothly and then it slows down a little when it gets busier; you can notice it when you pan the camera. It is 100% playable (going to use it as part of a 4 player LAN); I would just like to eke out a little more performance (maybe 3-5fps).
CIV 4: Again, runs well but not 100% smooth. Most of the graphics options are turned down low, but you don't really notice a performance drop off so much in this game. Note: I have only played an hour or two of this. It did take a lot of work to get working: the games minimum resolution (the height) is higher than what the aspire one supports. So, I found a fix on the net where you go into the config.ini file, set fullscreen = 0, and set horizontal resolution to 1314 (I think that's the number). For whatever reason this gives you a nice windowed mode.
Windows: Generally runs OK. I guess file transfers/installations might be a little slow, but I don't care; I just leave it. However, now and then during normal windows activities this system can hang for a coupe of seconds before it loads. Nothing that bugs me too much.
My Aspire: 16gb SSD, 1.6GHZ, 1gb RAM.
Note: They actually split the 16bg drive into 2x8gb drives, despite being advertised as 16gb, which is somewhat annoying.
Anyway, I hope that's informative
BoBo
Thanks for the update!