netbook

Acer Aspire One, 6 weeks later

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Quick summary: I’m loving the little guy.

Work: This week I was at a client’s site in Switzerland. I went to the office in the morning and left the power cable at the hotel. No problem – power lasts for a full day if you use it normally. I was mucking around in Eclipse, installing software, the hard disk was kept busy. When I left the office 8 hours later to get to the Christmas party, I had 24 minutes left on the battery.

Entertainment: In the hotel, I had a flaky wireless connection (thanks, unknown donor) which meant I had Skype, but I also had a bunch of TV shows on the 160 GB harddrive (not regretting that) and that meant independence from Swiss/Italian/German television. In between watching TV I was coding and listening to the Ender’s game audio books.

Gadget Envy: When I bought my first laptop in 97, people would walk up to me on the train and ask “is that a real computer?”. Over time, everyone got a laptop, and that reaction turned into “OMG, your laptop is OLD!”. Now they walk up to me again and the reaction is “is that thing a full PC? Can I lift it?”. The Acer makes people smile, gets them talking. I tell them that it’s great for work, but sucks for games other than AO (curse you all for not supporting Intel Graphics better), but makes a nice “minimum spec” platform for testing, too: my goal is for AO to still run on it after the engine upgrade.

Acer One wireless problems

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

My new Acer netbook is a delight. I’ll probably write about that at some point, but there’s one thing that’s annoying: The wireless card flakes out. What happens is that One moment I have wireless, the next it’s dropping, and even though Windows says I’m still connected, Nothing goes through. Trying to repair the network connection leads to an error message.

At this point the only thing that helps is to shut down the computer and start it again. That sucks. I’ve tried a bunch of driver updates, power saving settings and other tricks suggested in different forums and blogs, but to no avail.

Yesterday’s experiment seems to confirm that it’s a heat issue: I had the PC standing in my relatively cold bedroom, turned off the fan control utility, and it was happily downloading stuff for almost 48 hours. Then I turned up the heat a bit, put the netbook on the bed, which makes air circulation worse, and within an hour, the network had dropped again. So until a fix is released, I’ll need to provide my precious with good air supply and a chilly office.

Oh well.