Between the screen hinges you will find four LEDs which indicate power, disk activity, and caps and num lock status. Externally, the screen lid is covered in a piano white finish, while the base is of a rough texture, also white. The 0.9kg device’s looks won’t blow you away, but it is far from ugly. I also bought a 4GB SD card for storage expansion, but more on that later. I bought the One at a real-world shop, and I opted for the white variant, as the blue model looks awkward (blue and black isn’t as pretty a combination as white and black). This is a pretty convincing argument to go with the One, which is exactly what I did. The Wind costs EUR 429,-, while the One is yours for only EUR 299,. The biggest difference, however, comes when you look at the pricetags. The choice of software influences the choice of storage medium: since Windows XP has performance issues on SSD drives, the Wind comes with a traditional 80GB hard drive, while the One has an 8GB solid state drive. The Wind, on the other hand, comes with Windows XP Home.

The Acer Aspire One model I was looking at comes with Linux – Linpus Linux Lite v1.0.3.E, to be precise, a Fedora derivative. The big difference between the two is on the software front. Communication wise, they are identical, except for the fact that the Wind has built-in Bluetooth. Their displays might sport the same resolution, but the One has a 8.9″ screen while the Wind has a 10″ one. The MSI Wind has 1024MB of RAM, while the One only has 512MB (expandable to 1.5GB). The machines were more or less similar, both sporting the brand new Intel Atom 1.6Ghz processor, and a display with a 1024×600 resolution. Shopping around in Dutch online and real-world shops presented me with two netbook candidates: the Acer Aspire One, and the MSI Wind. Every self-respecting manufacturer has a netbook product line, or is about to introduce one (Apple?), so I figured I would take a look at what all the fuss is about: I bought a netbook. I used to call them ‘tiny laptops’, but somewhere along the way, Intel’s marketing got at me and now I call them netbooks.

There’s a new hype going on in the world of computing.

Acer aspire one pro