[nabs-l] netbook replacing notetakers

[Sarah J. Blake]

The machine I am using is the Acer Aspire One. The keyboard is only slightly 
than the one on my Lenovo Thinkpad S61. There are arrow keys on the lower 
righthand side, pgup above left arrow and pgdn above right arrow. Used with 
function key (which is 2nd key from bottom left next to ctrl) pgup and pgdn 
are home and end respectively. Del is on the top right and ins is next to 
it. Esc and F keys are on the top row. Main keyboard is standard. The 
touchpad is very small, below spacebar, and can be disabled with fn+F7. 
Screen backlight disables with fn+F6. Fn+up and down arrows control the 
volume; fn+left and right arrows control screen brightness.

The unit has a card slot, USB port, ethernet, monitor port, and power 
connection on left side and mic jack, earphone, two USB, and card slot on 
the right side. Internal mic is very good quality for this type of 
machine--it is located on the hinge behind the keyboard. Webcam is in the 
center top of the lid when open. Speakers are stereo.

Like a number of new laptops, this machine uses the Intel Graphics Mobile 
Accelerator. It took some tweaking to make it play nice with JAWS, but it is 
doable. I would blame this on Acer, but I had the same problem with Lenovo 
and I suspect that FS will need to address compatibility issues with these 
configurations. Perhaps it is less of an issue with Vista; but I refuse to 
use Vista at this point in time. The Acer machine comes with XP Home. At 
first glance, it seems to be a low-power machine: it has 1GB of memory. 
However, I am running it fairly hard: often have seven or eight windows open 
including Word. There are a few things that can be disabled in order to free 
up some memory for your own use. It is running generally as well as my 
3GB/3GHZ machine.



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