Vista and my new Acer Aspire L100
A couple of weeks ago I purchased an Acer Aspire L100 desktop PC and have only just got a chance to set it up and get using it.
I had been looking for a small ‘machine’ (in terms of physical size), with a decent monitor for some time now, I’m past all the ‘buy a full tower so I can upgrade the components myself at some stage’ thing… Machines are powerful enough these days and (more to the point) cheap enough that I don’t care about upgrading to the degree I used to.
I found an Acer Aspire L100 here (link may expire) on eBuyer it’s an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core with 1GB Ram, 160GB HDD, DL DVD and 19″ widescreen all for less than £450.
It was just exactly what I had been looking for, the chassis is about the size of a thick computer manual / technology book, it has a pretty decent monitor (1400 * 900) and fairly good spec. – enough for Visual Studio, web browsing, work processing, email etc – no gaming)
I replaced the 2 * 512MB ram sticks with 2 * 1GB stick from crucial and the operating system (Windows MCE 2005) with Vista Enterprise (drivers available for everything, no issues installing it).
The only pain has been that it doesn’t come with wireless built in – it does have Gigabit LAN, but wireless would have been nice. When I opened the chassis (voiding my warranty) to replace the memory I could see a miniPCI connection was available but not populated.
It runs pretty hot and the way they have fitted (stuffed/crammed) all the components in is an incredible piece of engineering, so I am reluctant to fit another card that will generate even more heat – in the end I settled for a USB wireless stick, cheap £10 job from eBuyer that does the job..
The chassis has VGA and DVI connectors, the monitor only a VGA connector, so I have that hooked up and bought a DVI to VGA adapter and plan on hooking up my other LCD monitor.
As part of this new regime I also ‘retasked’ my previous desktop PC (a full tower machine) to Windows Home Server – I had been invited to the closed beta, it had seemed pretty good and they had just released the CTP. More on that in another post…