Acer Aspire 1825PT 11.6in touchscreen notebook Some years ago, I made a fool of myself by describing Microsoft's ultimately doomed Tablet PC concept as a good idea. My saving grace was that I wasn't as dim as all the Tablet PC manufacturers, who chose to overprice their own products out of existence. Acer Aspire 1825PT Acer's Aspire 1825PT: if only Tablet PCs had always …
WTF is up with the Reg Hardware reviewer and banging on about "missing" CD drives? I have one in my laptop and used it last over 6 months ago. Windows 7 can be installed from USB, and almost everything else can be downloaded or sent via email. Please get the reviewers to state WHY they NEED a CD drive?!
Is it easy to replace the HDD with an SSD?
I am quite tempted by this little device. But getting rid of that 5400 RPM rubbish and putting in a proper SSD would be an essential upgrade for me. I can't live with HDD slowness and unreliability any more. Plus an SSD would boost the battery life a bit.
Give this a review, about £50 quid more than this acer, has built in wacom tablet with multitouch, comes with USB DVD burner, bigger screen similar power CPU/RAM/HD but added ATi 4550 mobile graphics so will even play Left 4 Dead!
I have one, sweet machine, and no I don't work for HP...
Windows 7 meh, not bothered about Windows even if it is the most reasonable version since NT 3.51. What about sticking Ubuntu on it, what's the touchscreen support like for that? (even with the netbook remix big icons which works a treat on a 7" 1st gen Asus eee netbook).
From a touchscreen point of view if its too heavy to hold and wobbles about if you have it on a desk then really what use is the touchscreen apart from being a bit gimmicky? The iPad is light, fast, long battery life and well suited to mobile applications (e.g. form filling, presentations, email, browsing, watching tv on the loo) and for the same price you get the top end device .. so I'm not sure if its worth the extra few hundred on top of a normal notebook price for the touchscreen element of the Acer even though I'm sure the hardware build is good .. its stuck in the same mould as the other Bill Gates Tablets of old albeit with a better hardware spec ... its just not as touchy or mobily as an iPad, hmm.
The only time I use a CD/DVD drive these days is for ripping media or a new OS install, everything else comes over the network (Wifi,3G or wired) and if you don't trust an outsourced cloud then just connect a NAS or file server (I've a NFS'ed ZFS server with 9Tb of RAIDZed usable space) and run it yourself. USB DVD drives are really cheap if you don't go for the ultra slimline versions and you only need one 8-)
Ripping isn't exactly rocket surgery, certainly no more than ripping CDs.
A PC netbook is likely to have a very large harddrive (much larger than what comes on that other table). So you can put quite a bit of content on a netbook. You can be well set for distraction even when you are completely off the grid.
A keyboard is still king for stuff like "filling in forms".
Actually, Apple has made the gap between it's tablet and a netbook a lot wider than it needs to be.
I've had one of these for a couple of weeks - it's a nice machine with a good keyboard and decent ports. iPad's great if you don't need those. The screen's quite shiny - which some people wouldn't like - but crisp with a good resolution. It's been reviewed and photographed at www.umpcportal.com and the HD looks to be accessible. Acer 1825PTZ is down-specced but cheaper.
Yes, it was "done right" over six months ago when HP brought out the Tm2. Basically, all the same specs as this Acer but cheaper, plus hybrid switchable discrete/integrated gfx (ATI and Intel). It looks sexier, it's cheaper, and you can boot OSx86 on it to get the OSX experience on a tablet that does not suck.
Bought mind from simplyacer.com for £510 +VAT a month ago. I thought the touchscreen would be a bit of a gimmick but have found it so much more intuitive and easier to interact with windows and icons using my finger - far less effort than using the smallish touchpad.
The screen is quite sensitive and the onscreen keyboard isn't as bad as I thought for typing, although I always switch to the real keyboard for extensive CMD prompt or email stuff.
I used it in a datacentre in tablet mode in portrait with the virtual keyboard at the bottom of the screen. It's the nearest I'll get to being a Star Trek engineer with a touch pad mobile device, connecting it into switches to interact with LANs, walking around using wifi to talk with engineers and most importantly to order from Pizza Hut online.
After 2 weeks of light use a piece of rubber fell off that helps to lock the screen flush after coming out of tablet mode. Not good. I've pushed it back in and because I'm now VERY mindful of it there hasn't been a problem since.
As an ordinary laptop it's terrific. Very small, lovely hi-res screen, lots of ram, fast cpu and 9 hours of battery life if used economically. As a tablet it's impressive and Windows 7 makes it far more usable in this format than previous releases. It will impress people, especially using Microsoft Surface (pre-installed). The MS Bing/Globe/Map app is very cool to interact with but is inferior to Google Earth in terms of features. But Google Earth (like Chrome) is totally unaware of gestures and sucks in tablet mode.
The Register's reviewer was very harsh to criticise the lack of a DVD drive. IT DOESN'T NEED ONE! Microsoft have a free tool that lets you create a USB stick to install Windows from. I have a 8GB stick for that purpose with the MS Office setup file on it as well, plus other favourite software. Bish, bosh, job done! It installs quicker from USB than DVD anyway. (All licensed I must add!)
I get his point about not being able to recover Windows if it dies, I would be annoyed about that if I didn't have my own licensed copy of Windows to install in the event of it going t*ts up.
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