Mini Laptop Reviews Blog

Yes! 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium with 1xUSB3.0 & Takes 8GB RAM!!!, April 20, 2011

By 

T. C. Bader “tbader” (DFW Area) – See all my reviews

  

9/7/2011 UPDATE:
Since people seem to still be getting some use from my review, I have added a few updates:

64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium?
YES, mine did come with the 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium version of Windows.
NOTE: If you get a netbook that has Windows 7 Starter on it, you will not have the desktop themes functionality available to you. I learned this the hard way when I got my 1005HA netbook. Not too big of a deal, but I did miss having all those nice themes. ASUS has a make-shift solution for this, but it requires manual intervention. Now that I have Windows 7 Home Premium, I can enjoy desktop themes once again!

USB v3.0?
YES, mine did come with one USB 3.0 port on the right side (the blue colored USB port). There is also another USB 2.0 port on the right, and one on the left (three ports in all). One of the two USB 2.0 ports allows you to charge a device even when the netbook is powered off and the AC adapter is connected. You can even configure it to charge another device with just the battery alone and the netbook turned off. A nice feature to have if you travel and find yourself in a bind with a low cell phone battery!

Accepts 8GB of RAM?
YES, mine did accept an 8GB memory upgrade kit! I installed the Corsair 8 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory Kit CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9, which is about $83. The memory that initially came with the 1215B was: hynix 2GB 1Rx8 PC3 – 10600S – 9 – 10 – B1
Be sure to get PC3-10600 compliant memory, NOT the Crucial CT25664BC1067 2GB 204-PIN PC3-8500 SODIMM DDR3 Memory Module that is SUPPOSEDLY bought together with the 1215B. PC3-10600 memory runs at a faster clock rate than PC3-8500. Do a Wikipedia search for “DDR3″ RAM to see a comparison table. Also, according to cpu-world dot com, the E-350 CPU supports memory up to DDR3-1333 and DDR3L-1066. DDR3L is suppose to run at less voltage, thus saves more on battery power. I would like to know if anyone has tested DDR3L memory in their 1215B netbook, and how they do on power savings!
BTW, my 1215B shipped with BIOS version 0306.
[UPDATE: 5/1/2011]
I just updated to BIOS to version 0315 and so far everything is still running smoothly. I included how I updated my BIOS in the Comments section below, in case you wondered how to do it.

Touch Pad Issues?
NO, mine DOES NOT have the touch pad issues that others are complaining about. But you can read their review(s) on what the fix is, which seems simple enough.
[UPDATE: 9/7/2011]
A few months ago I was using my 1215B at the couch without the external mouse, and it DID mess up on me as others have indicated. I uninstalled the Synaptics drivers, and when I rebooted the computer, the mouse still worked. As a matter of fact, it seemed to work better than with the Synaptics drivers. The only problem was that while typing, my fingers would touch the touchpad and the cursor would jump to a different location and mess me up. I went to the Synaptics web site and downloaded their latest drivers, which they now have a new feature called Scrybe, which allows you to do certain gestures as shortcuts, such as swiping a ‘W’ to pull up the web browser for example. BTW, I had to re-install the Synaptics drivers in order to disable the touchpad so that I could type and not have the cursor jump around on me. It does make me upset that I also have problems with the touchpad. Since I don’t like touchpads and prefer an external mouse, this makes it OK for me, but if you do rely on touchpads exclusively, then you will likely run into problems.

Keyboard?
As far as the layout is concerned, I do like it better than the 1005HA, since the 1215B has separate keys for Home, End, PgUp, and PgDown. Of course, the 1215B is a little bigger and so it does have more surface area for more full keys. The cursor arrow keys double as Media Player Play/Pause, Stop, Skip Forward and Backward when used with the Fn key, which I thought I would utilize more, but so far I haven’t. The Backspace and Enter keys are decent sized and easy to find. Others have mentioned keyboard “flex”, which yes, I have noticed that when pressing keys more towards the middle of the keyboard, that the keyboard seems to flex downward, giving those who are real sticklers about such things a reason to complain about it. It hasn’t really bothered me that much, but I thought I would mention it just to be fair. [Update: 06/13/2011] I opened my 1215B today and noticed that the ‘X’ key was missing, but managed to find it. What had happened was that the metal piece that holds the key in place became bent. I bent it back so that it would hold…

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All the answers you are looking for, April 14, 2011

By 

Adam N. Capper (San Luis Obispo, CA USA) – See all my reviews

  

– Upgrade Update (7/27/11) –:
As promised I got the crucial m4 SSD and 8gb of ram installed. The perfect word to describe performance is snappy. The upgrades don’t make the 1215b a performance laptop by any means, but all the usual tasks that one would use a netbook for are quick to load, quick to respond, and a pleasure to use. Installation was easier than expected, especially considering you basically have to dismantle the 1215b to access the hard drive. The biggest speed difference is in start up and shut down time. Cold startups take 30 seconds for Windows to load and I haven’t even make any modifications to see if that can be faster. Remember this is 30 seconds on a netbook processor! Shut down is 6.7 seconds!

The upgrades make this system the most expensive netbook I have ever heard of, and there is quite a bit of completion our there in the $600 range, but I honestly can say because I do the basics a lot and never really need a powerful processor expect for HD video I prefer to have this expensive but portable netbook with great battery life as opposed to any other more powerful laptop out there.

– Update (7/20/11) –:
=============================================================================================================================
I have had the 1215b for a few months now and I want to address an issue that has arisen for me.
I said in my original review that I did not have the track pad issues many people have mentioned. Well, about a week ago I started experiencing problems. I did a little digging and the problem stems from the poor placement of a pad under the track pad which is interfering with an electrical relay and frankly doesn’t even need to be there. Removing the pad is a 5 minute fix and seems to fix the problem for most everyone. You do not need to void your warranty to do this and you do not need to be super tech savy to do the fix yourself. Please leave me a comment if you need additional explanation. I will post a link below, but I believe Amazon will remove the link in this review so go to the comments section where I will repost the link.

[...]

When I originally bought this netbook I wanted just that: a netbook. However, the 1215b is so close to having true laptop performance that I was inspired to spend some money to really get it there. In the coming days I will be installing 8gb of ram (up from the 4gb I already upgraded to), and a 64gb Crucial m4 SSD. The biggest bottleneck in this thing (granting the processor) seems to be the hard drive so I am really looking forward to seeing what happens with the upgrade. The ram upgrade is really just for peace of mind. To upgrade with the 8gb of ram and 64gb SSD will cost an additional $174. We will see if the performance of this thing basically costing $600 is worth it.

The fact that I am willing to invest even more money in this thing is the best indicator of my time with it. I really do love this machine and, given the fix for the track pad, now have no hesitations in recommending it to anyone that wants a netbook, or even to someone who wants a laptop but is on a tight budget. Most consumers waste their money on ultra powerful processors and 16gb of ram. If a computer can surf the web, send email, run the Microsoft Office suite, do some light gaming, and play video (including Youtube, Netflix, and digital copy) both in SD and HD quality, while getting 5-7 hours of battery life, I really believe 70% of consumers would be completely happy. The 1215b does all this easily and can also be used for light photoshop use and slingbox access, as well as music editing, and light video editing. I know the 1215b can handle all this because I have done every one of these activities on this machine.

If I were you I would wait till the back to school sales start to see if you can little price drop on the 1215b, but I really do think it is worth the $430 asking price.

=============================================================================================================================
– Original Review –

The following are the answers to everything I wanted to know before purchase:

Comes with 1 usb 3.0 port, 2 usb 2.0 ports

Comes with Windows Home Premium 64 bit

300gb of usable hard drive space. Asus has this partitioned into one 100gb partition and another 188gb partition. I have no idea why. You can easily combine the partitions in Windows 7 to give you a 300gb hard drive.

This is the matte black version. No gloss on the outside, but there is gloss on the keyboard area (not on the keys themselves). The bezel and screen are also gloss.

True to what amazon says the 1215b comes with 2 ram slots. One slot is occupied by a 2gb stick. If you want to upgrade you will need a 204-pin SODIMM, DDR3 PC3-10600 memory module. I have installed the…

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Asus and AMD have a winner…just about, May 1, 2011

Pros

-Came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
-E-350s processing power and better than average graphics performance
-Overall great looking laptop
-USB 3.0 port
-USBCharge+, an application that allows you to charge devices through USB even when the laptop is off
-6 hours of battery life
-Island-style keyboard with Home, PgUp, PgDn, and End (Keys missing from the similarly spec’d Dm1z)

Cons

-Typical bloatware that you find on a lot of PCs
-Trackpad is a single rocker bar that is noticible loud
-Harddrive came partitioned very oddly, it can be fixed quite easily in Windows 7 but the end user shouldn’t have to worry about this.
-Charging adapter doesn’t always charge laptop on first plug in.
-Trackpad unresponsiveness at time

I am overall satisfied with my purchase, but it is mainly because I was able to fix a lot of the Cons I had with this laptop when I first purchased it. First I will focus on the Pros.

I was consider Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit to be a plus because with a smaller sized form-factor, it rarely has the horsepower to utilize the 64-bit version of the operating system. The first Pro is directly related to the second Pro, the processor, is actually really good. I had Google Chrome running with about 12 Tabs open, looking at a movie trailer in 720p with Microsoft Office applications running in the background and it handled the load just fine. The movie trailer played at a respectable 28 fps without a single drop in frames, a task your typical Single-Core or Dual-Core Intel Atom CPU could not do.

The USB 3.0 is a welcoming addition for future-proofing if not anything else. USB 3.0 will become the standard in file transferal and peripheral use so its a pleasant surprise that Asus decided to include the port on this laptop.
Speaking of USBs there are a total of 3 on this laptop, a USB 3.0 port, a standard USB 2.0 port, and a USB 2.0 charging port (the USB port located on the left side of the laptop). This port in conjuntion with the pre-installed software program USBCharger+ allows you to charge a device through the USB Port while the laptop is turned off, not sleeping, not hibernating, completely shut off. This is the laptop that I travel a lot with and since its so light I keep it in my backbag. If the battery on my phone is starting to run low I can just plug my existing USB cord in the port and charge my device up without having to power on the laptop. This probably doesn’t seem like a really great feature for a lot of people but for road warriors, its a pretty useful feature.

Battery life is subjective based on your usage but I found that it provided just enough power to get through my normal class day without having to bring a charger while still being able to provide a little juice to my smartphone. With brightness set to around 60%, Wifi enabled, running multiple Tabs on Google Chrome, and typing in Google Docs, I get around 6 hours of usage. Just like any computer, if you start streaming video or running heavy flash content you can expect to have your runtime cut by about 30 to 40%.
The last Pro I will talk about is the island keyboard. I’m sure what percent it is of a full fledged keyboard but it is quite comfortable to type on. The keys have a nice amount of compression and gives a satisfying click without being too noisy. I would prefer if the keys were slightly rubberized and less slick but its definitely better than your average keyboard for this form-factor.

Now I’m gonna discuss the Cons. The bloatware is really easy to deal with, just go to the control panel and delete the programs you don’t want. I do recommend you giving this applications a try first before deleting them. USBCharge+ is one of those rare gems I’ve actually liked when it comes to preloaded applications.

The Trackpad bar is something I rarely use thanks to an application called TwoFingerScroll. This application allows you to add MacOS like gesture to the keypad such as tapping with two fingers to enable right-click, a gesture that the Synaptics drivers on typical PC trackpads don’t natively support.
The Harddrive is something I didn’t quite understand. The harddrive has about 300GB available but you can only access about 90GB of it. I had to use the Device Manager in WIndows 7 to re-partition the harddrive. This is something that a non-techie would definitely be bothered with, hell I’m a techie and I’m bothered with it; Asus should definitely fix this in the future.

When you first look at the Charging Port on the 1215b you might confuse it with an Audio or Microphone jack because its so small. The Charger has an extremely tiny plug which seems very fragile and could easily break overtime. I came home really late from class feeling pretty tired, so I grabbed my laptop from my bag, threw it on the charger, and collapsed on my bed for some much…

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Nifty Lil Netbook, February 23, 2011

When I was out looking for a laptop, one of the tech guys warned me that no matter what (non-apple) brand or type of laptop I chose, after 1 year the battery life would diminish by half, and then after the second year it would decrease by half again. So a 4 hour laptop battery would last only 1 hour after 2 years. I dont know if this is true, but in my experience my old windows based laptops never had long battery life.

So I looked a long time for a netbook with a long battery life. I was willing to give up computing power and processor speed for battery life, and I only wanted to run the MS Office suite and a browser. If you are like me, you’ll find your needs nicely met with the AOD255E, which lasts for a full 8+ hours and recharges quickly. I charge it about once a week, and I use it about 3 days per week.

Not sure why, but battery life seems to be a function of both the processor (how the processor efficiently uses battery power) and the number of battery cells. This netbook uses an Intel Atom 455 and a 6 cell battery and gets at least an 8 hour charge, so far. I dont know if Acer designed for this combination or if they just merged these two features together, but so far it has resulted in good results.

It comes with Windows 7 starter. I dont really want to upgrade to the full version of 7 because I like the spare starter version. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but also very quick to load and quick to operate. Out of the box this netbook is sloooooow, but I bought the 2 GB ram upgrade suggested by Amazon, which I confirmed with Crucial was the correct one. Because the AOD255E is such a new model, Crucial did not have pictures of the netbook, so they couldn’t send me pictorial directions on swapping out my memory chip. So I had a computer friend swap it out for me- he said it is easy to figure out if you’ve swapped out netbook memory before. He said I could swap out for as much as 4 GB RAM, but in checking wikipedia, it says the max for System 7 Starter is 2 GB RAM.

When I first got my netbook, and was paying attention to this kind of thing, I could use it for about 2 hours and it would still tell me it had 9 hours of power left. I dont really notice anymore because I havent hit the battery life wall yet.

It is very light and cute and doesnt give off a lot of heat while operating. I carry it in this hard case: Notebook Hard Case up to 14.1″ color Green with shoulder strap – Low Profile. which I bought on sale for cheap from Amazon, and decorated the netbook with this matching skin: iPod Touch Skin (High Gloss Finish) – Lime Punch which was way too expensive but I couldnt resist it. I get lots of admiring comments when I whip my notebook out because it looks adorable, but mostly I am happy with the performance and at 2 lbs, my shoulder never aches from carrying it around.

I think that it currently comes only in black, which fingerprints way too easily, but with a skin on, its fine.

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Upgraded memory to 2GB, March 23, 2011

1) Yes, Windows 7 Starter *does* support 2GB of memory. It says so on Microsoft’s website.

2) A 2GB memory module that works is Crucial’s part number CT1596442, which is an 8 chip (4 on each side), single rank, PC8500, DDR3, 2GB module. Its Micron part number is MT8JSF25664HZ-1G1D1.

3) I removed the keyboard by releasing the *four* tabs at the top (“North”) side of the keyboard using a very small screwdriver and levering up with an old driver’s license (which was a little stiffer than a credit card). I then was able to slide a much thinner plastic card I had underneath the top of the keyboard and then work the card around underneath the keyboard (a playing card also might work well for this).

4) There is an excellent video on YouTube for an Aspire One D255 titled “Acer Aspire One D255 Ram Upgrade” that shows the steps pretty well. The internal layout of the D255 shown in the video appeared to me to be essentially the same as that of the D255E (I happily discovered!).

5) I like this netbook a whole lot, especially with the nice speedup that’s a consequence of upgrading the memory to 2GB from 1GB.

Addendum — Crucial part number CT25664BC1067, has two flavors. The one Amazon appears to be supplying, at least to some people, is CT25664BC1067.16xx. This is a 16 chip dual rank module that will not work in an Acer Aspire One D255E. The CT25664BC1067.8xx version is an 8 chip single rank version and is an alternate name for the CT1596442, the one that Crucial is selling for the D255E. Apparently, the D255E does not like dual rank. The number of chips is neither here nor there. The term “rank” refers to how the chips are connected together on the module.

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Installing 2GB will void your warranty!!!!!, February 28, 2011

By 

R. Greene “meggabitz” (New England) – See all my reviews

  

This is taken directly from their support site “While the Aspire One AOD255 series supports a total of 2GB of DDR3 RAM, due to the design of the netbook the RAM on the Aspire One AOD255 series is not replaceable and Acer does not support upgrading or replacing the RAM.”

This should be noted in the description, not that it stopped me since I was able to determine how easy it really is to replace the RAM. Not that I am going to do so, since it would void my warranty.

For those who wish to void their warranty and install 2GB’s of RAM, it should take you about 10mins tops to swap it out.

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