Picked up the Acer Aspire One 120GBNetBook a couple of hours ago.

First impressions of the machine are good - but the OS it comes with is really quite limiting if you like to piss around more than the average Internet browser user. Otherwise it's simple and straightforward to use.

Not sure if it's making full use the Atom power management - fan seems to ramp up to max when idle and battery life says 2 hours, with screen on full and WiFi in close proximity to the base station.

Sound is expectedly tinny but it goes reasonably loud and you can comfortably watch YouTube on the thing without trying too hard to hear some guy shout 'GET OUT OF MY CLOSET' at a cat.

It's not silent - but can't control the fan speed with the built-in apps so I will see how loud each component is later on when I get some other OS on this thing. Thinking about Ubuntu 8 and disabling Compiz and making all the text really small to maximize use of the small screen.

One thing my laptop (IBM T60) has that this small one doesn't - a built in light for the keyboard, which I actually use quite a bit. So we will see if this is a problem, especially when getting used to the new really small keys on this thing.

Wireless range is good, antenna must be in a decent position inside the case. No bluetooth is a little bit gay but the built in camera is a nice touch. Not bad quality, but the framerate is around 5fps. We will see what new OS and software will do to this too. Also I wonder if I can put more RAM in too.

Well *I haven't dropped the bastard yet, so we will see how long she lasts.
Tschuss!

Some things I want to do

Here are some tasks that I wish to complete by Christmas.

Obtain the following DVDs:

• Grave of the Fireflies
• Spirited Away 2 disc set

Watch the following:

• Wall-E 1080p on a fat projector
• Bleach anime that Karl gave me
• Louis Theroux Philadelphia documentary

Go to media markt and finally decide on which netbook I will get

Visit the Atomium restaurant

Practise guitar for an hour a day

Go to Aachen

That is all for now

Windows XP Crash on Demand

If you need to generate a memory/kernel dump for any reason, you can force XP into a blue screen of death:

Hold right control key, press scroll lock twice quickly

There is a registry setting that is to be enabled for this to work - however it was already enabled here. I can't tell if it's enabled on a standard XPSP2 build (this is a custom corporate build).

Obviously this will hang your session so I don't need to tell you to save your work before doing it.