IT: The Attack of Netbooks

The Financial recession of 2007-2009 has forced many companies to shelve or reduce their IT budget. Intel and AMD seeing that many of its customers cut back orders, go into low-cost processor which is used to power the netbooks. Intel Atom series of processor was introduced by Asus in 2008. Since then, HP, Dell, Acer and many other traditional PC/notebooks manufacturer come up with their Netbook varieties.

One of them is the Acer AspireOne series. The review model is the ZA3; Serial no:A0751H introduced in June 2009. It is powered by a Intel Atom Z520 1.3Ghz processor and comes with 2GB Ram and 160GB hard disk. It comes with either Windows XP Home or Linux editions.

As with most Netbooks, it has a webcam installed on its 11.6" LCD screen. The keyboard is well spaced and is suitable even for large fingers like mine. Its 6-cell battery life can last 4 to 8 hrs of usage and total weight is about 1.3kg. For interfaces, it has 3 USB 2.0 ports one VGA port, one Realtek Gigabit LAN port and a SD/MMC/Memory stick card reader. The Atheros 802.11b/g Wireless adapter top up the netbook.

Performance wise, been a Atom powered, it can never fight with a notebook. But given its low cost, it fulfill its usage as a basic notebook for web surfing. light gaming & basic office editing. Anything more and the netbook will crawl. The 2GB ram did make things a little more bearable.