In numerous ways, the Acer Aspire One 751h, the company’s first 11.6-inch netbook, is an improvement over its recently refreshed 10-inch kin: users get an additional inch of screen real estate, a roomier keyboard, and more than 7 hours of electric electric battery life (its smaller kin, the D150, lasts an hour less). But whereas it’s bigger, the 751h has a weaker processor. The outcome is a netbook that examines and feels great but boasts slower performance than other appliances in its class.
item proceeded underneath
Design
If you’ve seen the 10-inch Aspire One D250, the 11.6-inch version will look well known. It, too, has a glossy very dark top with Acer’s steel logo influenced in the smaller corner; the top choices up fingerprints equitably effortlessly. Like the somewhat more upscale Timeline sequence, it has a gray palm rest and keyboard deck with a very dark keyboard and slim bezel to agree.
As with the Timeline sequence, the overall effect is conservative, but not cheap-looking. The real cornerstone of the Aspire One’s conceive is not the color conceive anyway, but its thinness. while its competitors, such as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA, can be as thick as 1.4 inches and weigh close to 3 pounds (the 1005HA weighs 2.8), the Aspire One has a negligible footprint of 11.2 x 7.8 x 1.0 inches, whereas it weighs 3 pounds (and 3.6 with its adapter). In the hand, it feels just somewhat heavier than the Toshiba mini NB205, but that’s offset rather by the narrower build.
The only apprehend: its six-cell battery juts out the back, while some netbooks, such as the Eee PC 1005HA, have comparably dimensions electric batteries that are more flush with the scheme (and manage to consign longer battery life, to boot. More on that later).
Keyboard
Like the Aspire Timeline 3810T, the Aspire One 751h has increased keys, whose plastic has a somewhat textured feel. The layout is close to full dimensions, and we appreciate that the right Shift key is full dimensions and in the correct place. feel typists will have no difficulty with this netbook, but we noticed that the keyboard flexed as we pounded out responses to IMs.
On our first Ten Thumbs Typing Test, we tallyd 71 phrases per minute; our largest tally on our desktop computer is 88 phrases per minute. Then, we directly took the test afresh and tallied 86 phrases per minute, which proposes you’ll expected acclimate rapidly.
Touchpad and Touch Button
When we reviewed the latest 10-inch Aspire One, we deplored about the minute touchpad. With the 751h’s slightly broader footprint, however, comes a broader touchpad (2.5 x 1.6 inches), which was a pleasing enhancement over the D250’s 2.0 x 1.5-inch pad. It’s still fairly short, though, particularly compared to the NB205’s (3.1 x 1.6 inches) tremendous touchpad.
We have a larger concern the lone feel button, which we found too rigid and slender. Aside from the rigidness, we would have preferred two buttons, as there are on the NB205 and other netbooks.
Display and Sound
One thing the 751h offers that most of its 10-inch competitors don’t is a high-res screen. while the 1005HA, NB205, and 10-inch Apsire One all have exhibitions with 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, the AO751h’s 11.6-inch display has a tenacity of 1366 x 768. Those extra vertical pixels, in particular, signify you won’t have to scroll down as often when you’re viewing pages, a widespread inconvenience with netbooks.
We were directly influenced by the screen’s brightness. When we observed a Saturday Night reside sketch on Hulu.com we enjoyed pleasing colors and, furthermore, good viewing twists even from oblique edge twists. The glossy finish restricted our examining twists from the front, however, when we dropped the top forward slightly we were still adept to make out the clip. By the time we got to a 45-degree angle, however, the screen emerged washed out.
The capacity, as you would anticipate with a netbook, is feeble. observing a clip in a quiet room with the netbook right in front of us, the sound was never too loud. melodies, too, rang out predictably tinny, but no poorer than it does on other netbooks: the bass in “Seven Nation armed detachment” by The White Stripes, for instance, was distant.
Docks and Webcam
The 751h has a benchmark selection of docks: three USB ports, VGA yield, an Ethernet jack, headphone and mic docks, and a 4-in-1 recollection business business card reader. The recollection card book book book reader, VGA, and one USB port on the right edge, and the rest on the left.
The netbook comes with an embedded 1.3-MP webcam. In a Skype brief talk, our friend reported minimal latency with better colors and brightness than on his Apple iSight camera.
Presentation
commonly, when we register a netbook’s specs we sound like a broken record: almost all have 1GB of RAM, Windows XP dwelling, a 160GB hard drive, and either a 1.6-GHZ or 1.66-GHz Intel Atom processor. The AO751h has most of these identical constituents, except for the processor. rather than, this netbook has a 1.33-GHz Intel Atom Z520 CPU.
whereas timepiece pace isn’t habitually the be-all and end-all of computing power, in this case the presentation delta was obvious. The 751h’s PCMark05 score of 1,080 trails the tallies of its competitors, including the NB205 (1,496) and the 10-inch Acer Aspire One (1,492), which has a 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU. Its boot time of 46 seconds, although, was right in line with both the 1005HA (47 seconds) and the 10-inch Aspire One (49 seconds).
While all netbooks present abysmally on our multitasking test, in which we transcode a 5-minute-and-5-second MP4 document to the AVI format, the AO751h fared particularly poorly: It accomplished the test in 35 minutes and 11 seconds; the 1005HA took 27:25, and the NB205 took 27:23. Even the 10-inch Aspire One managed 28:51. Even though we wouldn’t suggest transcoding HD video on any netbook, we believe the gap in these tallies reflects the 751h’s need of power.
Anecdotal presentation
Even in our everyday usage, the 751h felt slow. When we cut into into the command section to find out what kind of processor it has, the 751h took a few seconds to apprehend up. And when we opened Internet Explorer while video chatting with a friend on Skype, the video fallen out for a couple of seconds, and afresh, a couple of seconds passed before the netbook could overlap these two windows.
To put this in context, we timed a couple of everyday tasks against the Toshiba mini NB205, which has a 1.6-GHz Atom processor. while beginning Internet Explorer took about one second for the 751h, it took less than a second for the NB205. unfastening the Control section, as we did earlier, and letting all the icons load, took 2 seconds with the 751h, and 1 second with the NB205. In neither case is the performance improper, but the NB205 was always faster, and, more important, sensed zippier on our testing.
Graphics
Like many other netbooks we’ve reconsidered, the 751h uses Intel’s integrated GMA 500 graphics solution, with 384MB of distributed memory. As with the intensive multitasking check, netbooks never breeze through our graphics benchmarks, and the the AO751h was no exclusion. While the typical netbook scores 630 on 3DMark03 and 96 on the more intensive 3DMark06, the 751h organised just 415 and 86, respectively. Still, when we played round in Google soil we were adept to go by plane to a dwelling in Brooklyn, NY and to the British repository in London without too many hiccups. certain, the air travel was a bit bumpy, and it took a few seconds for the 3D structures in New York town to load, but the know-how didn’t seem at all frustrating.
Then afresh, when we did a side-by-side evaluation with the NB205, soaring to the Chrysler Building at the same time, we observed that the NB205 reached at our destination first, and laden the 3D buildings much faster. As the seconds ticked away, the 751h was still working to render those buildings. Moreover, when we tried to watch a 720p movie it sputtered along; we’ve skilled glossy results when doing this on other netbooks, and have even been adept to output them to an HD monitor.
Storage
Like other netbooks, the 751 has a 160GB, 5,400 rpm hard propel. On the LAPTOP move Test, it made a duplicate a 4.97GB mixed-media folder in 5 minutes and 45 seconds, which converts to a rate of 14.8 MBps. That’s right in line with the netbook category average (14.6 MBps), but you’ll still find significantly much quicker hard drives in numerous comparably priced 10-inch netbooks. The 10-inch Aspire One, Eee PC 1005HA, and NB205, for example, were all much quicker, accomplishing the check at rates of 16.5 MBps, 19.9 MBps, and 18.1 MBps, respectively.
Battery Life and Wi-Fi
The 751h has some strong affray in the electric battery life department: we recently hailed both the 1005HA and the NB205 for lasting nearly nine hours on our battery check. The 751h lasted 7 hours and 8 minutes on the LAPTOP electric battery test, which, while not as long as the other netbooks listed, is still an impressive tally; it beats the six-cell netbook category mean by nearly 90 minutes.
regardless of having 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, which we wouldn’t anticipate to have as strong a range as a wireless-N radio, the 751h sustained very good throughput of 21.0 Mbps and 20.0 Mbps at 15 and 50 feet, respectively, both of which are overhead mean for the netbook class.
Programs and Warranty
The 751h arrives with a alallotmentment of test and bundled programs. These programs include a 60-day test of Microsoft agency dwelling and scholar 2007 (including a Compatibility bag and PowerPoint viewer), CyberLink PowerDVD 8 (an strange choice, granted that there’s no optical drive), Google Desktop, Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, and Windows reside Essentials. It has a one-year warranty, which includes 24/7, toll-free telephone support. ascertain out Acer's presentation in our Tech Support Showdown to glimpse how the manufacturer stacks up against the affray.
Configurations
While our model of the 751h had a six cell electric battery, you can opt for the three-cell type for $349. There are also two models that have else identical specs, but 250GB, 5,400 rpm hard drives. The three-cell electric electric battery type charges $399, and the six-cell type costs $449.
Verdict
If you’re craving a little more computer display real land parcel than the mean netbook, along with a high-res brandish, the $379 Acer Aspire One 751h blends several compelling characteristics, such as seven hours of electric battery life and an exceptionally slim 1-inch broad form. But if all you desire is a netbook—and not inevitably an 11-inch one—there are some comparably charge (albeit, wider) 10-inch models, such as the $399 Toshiba NB205 and the $389 ASUS 1005HA, which run much quicker and last even longer.
Acer Aspire One 751h Drivers