I've had a lot of laptops in the past 12 years, starting with a tiny little HP Compaq that ran DOS and eventually moving to a 15.4" HP running various incarnations of Windows. I thought the 15.4" laptops were reasonably small considering the popularity of 17" screens. In 2006, I discovered the 2.9-lb HP NC2400, which got 7.5 hours of life on an eight-cell battery. Unfortunately, its batteries suffered from the memory effect. My particular model was also a bit of a slow poke.
I bought another 12" laptop which was much more powerful and got 6.5 hours of life on its stancard battery. The extra battery that connected to the bottom (and added about a pound to its weight and an inch to its bulk) gave me another couple of hours.
I am a seminary student, active both in school and church life. This means that I spend a lot of time away from home. It is not unusual for me to spend 11 hours on campus on some days. I also have two significant special needs. I have a visual impairment, which means that I carry extra equipment along with my laptop on many occasions. I rely on my laptop for note-taking rather than scrawling in the margina of my Bible or other scratch paper in church. I have a condition ismilar to rheumatoid arthritis. The 20-pound load I carried in the fall of 2006 really was not good for me physically. In addition to the impact of weight itself, distribution of weight can affect my pain level significantly. The search continued for a machine that would be small enough to carry with me and give me reasonable battery life. Enter "the baby."
It weighs 2.1 pounds (less than my Lenovo ThinkPad) and has an 8.9" screen. This should make me extremely portable: the thing fits nicely in a medium-sized women's purse!
The keyboard layout is fairly intuitive for the most part. There are a couple of oddball configurations since there are only 84 keys. Insert and delete are on the top right corner. Home and end are created with combinations of function key plus pgup and pgdn respectively. (The function key is the second key from the left on the bottom, the first being ctrl.) There is a tiny touch pad below the keyboard with left and right mouse buttons on either side. Reviewers complained about it; but it didn't seem like a major problem to me in comparison with touch pads on some of the other machines I've owned. Almost all of them have yielded some kind of complaint about the mouse device.
The layout of the ports is very nice. On the left side, from front to back, there is a card slot, USB port, ethernet port, and display connector port. In the right there is a mic jack, headphone jack, two USB ports, and a card slot. On the front, under the lip of the machine on the right side, is a hardware toggle for turning wireless on and off.
The one potential annoyance about this machine is its lack of an optical drive. This means that an external one must be purchased or some other means must be found to install software. It comes with a 60-day trial of MS Office Home and Student. Since I own Office professional, I uninstalled the trial and went about figuring out how to install my version without an optical drive. I ended up sharing the drive on my other machine and connecting through my network so that I could run the program from there. Of course, buying an external drive is also an option. For me, the lack of optical drive is a minor problem. This a travel machine; and I don't need a CD/DVD drive on the go.
I discovered on my first run that the machine does not have bluetooth capability. This is not a deal killer--bluetooth does take up battery life. However, I would have liked to know since I use a braille display that has been running on bluetooth. I later changed it to USB mode, and all was fine; but on my first outing I was not able to use the display. During this trip, I spent about five hours editing audio files on the machine. It still had a bit of charge left when I was done.
I located a 9-cell battery and am in the process of running tests on it. My hard-run test (continus music playing, braille display connected, low volume but enough to recognize the songs) yield a little over 6.5 hours of life after the initial charge. I don't rely fully on this test since the first charge is sometimes not a complete one. I would expect more life from my standard use, which does not involve putting my music list on shuffle for 6.5 hours!
I know of three other people who have bought these machines. All use screen reading technology. The use of screen readers on the Acer is worth talking about. I am told it works well out of the box with Window-Eyes. Some tweaking is needed in order to get JAWS installed and running correctly. The machine can be set up initially with Narrator. I installed JAWS from an external hard drive; and I needed to remove McAfee before running the JAWS activation wizard. (I later put another antivitus program on the machine.) Some display tweaks are also necessary and can be accomplished in about 30 minutes once JAWS is installed. If you buy one of these machines and need help with this process, I am happy to assist. Feel free to email me for help with JAWS on the Acer. Please put "JAWS on Acer" in the subject line.
There is a memory foam case available for the Acer. Reviewers complained about the small size of the front pocket and how few externals they could pack in. My reaction has consistently been, "I don't know what they're talking about!" At one point, I packed in an extra 6-cell battery, my 24-cell braille display, a card reader, a USB cable, and a pair of ear buds! That is quite a lot to pack! If I really wanted to pack heavily, I would slip this case inside a larger bag along with more externals.