Where in US did you get your 751?

I'm trying to find out if the Acer Aspire One 751 is available anywhere in the US either brick & mortar or online. If you got one, please leave a note as to where you got it! Thanks.

 

wal-mart ... lewis center, ohio
the model with 2gig of ram and 250gig hdd
$398

clerk said it rang up "invalid"... but he processed the sale without saying anything else

 

Yesterday, my Walmart now had theirs back on the shelves. I assume they were available for sale, but I did see an employee take one out, scan it and put it back in the case. Not sure if he was just checking for someone calling in or what.

 

Hey, wondering if you agree with HaTaX, who says in this thread (below) that he's going to return his 751 which feels to him like a rush job on Acer's part?

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=87&t=14794

 

hmm...Do I agree that it was rushed? No, not really. I believe it a strange and very niche design though. The touchpad is mediocre, at best, but no worse (if not better) than other Acer offerings. I wish they would improve this though. Other than that I have no complaints about the overall design. except the slightly slower hardware (although Dell mini 12 uses this same combo, and I think Asus's upcoming 11" will too). Yes, it does feel more "flimsy" than say the 10" Asus offerings, but I figured I have to give up a bit of the "rugged" feel so I can get a thinner and lighter machine.

I stayed with this over the other larger netbook choices mainly because I think it meets my particular needs better than any of the others. My netbook is basically for sitting on the couch while web-surging, chatting, and playing online poker. So for me I wanted light, small, long battery, and easy to use keyboard. My thoughts on the other 11-12" netbooks were basically as follow:

Dell Mini 12. Terriblific keyboard. All sorts of shrunken keys on a keyboard that doesn't extend nearly to the edge of the chasis. Screen was pretty bad as well...colors looked washed out, and the viewing angles were the worst on any laptop I've yet to try (about 10 in the last year). With a large bezel and big area surrounding the keyboard edges, the footprint was quite large and it just felt enormous compared to my 10" netbooks.

NC20 - Love the NC10, but haven't used this. I think the keyboard and touchpad are the same material/design, but possible larger. I thought both were great on the NC10. However, I was a bit turned off by the overall size and the price of $550.

HP DV2 - Really tempted to get this...staples actually has it for $550 right now after rebate. That's pretty great considering the included usb optical drive and better performance. I can't pull the trigger, though, because the battery life. The athlon Neo and dedicated ATI card are power hungry, and from what I've read, average use will run 2.5-3 hours with the 6 cell. Oh...and it's super super shiny everywhere...which is kinda a turnoff to me having greasy hands most of the time.

If I didn't really desire the larger screen for playing poker, my NC10 (or tne new N110) would be a great pick (or even the Asus N10, which is so so nicely built, but bulky). I ended up picking, and keeping the Acer 751 due to the inadequacies of the other larger netbook offerings. While I feel it is the best now, I may replace it in a few months. Right now, my two biggest hopefuls are the Lenovo S12 and the Dr. Mobile Freestyle 1300n

 

I can explain a little of why I feel it was rushed. Mainly it's the fit and finish of the software side of things, I only have a few complaints about the case and keyboard and those are more of a preference then anything.

The things that bothered me hardware / case wise were:

Rough HD cover, which is metal picks up dirt VERY easily, mine was white so other colors may be better about this.

Keyboard, size is great but the design leaves alot to be desired. I thought it was just me having trouble with it so I let my very petite wife use it. I got it back 10 minutes later saying she couldn't stand the keyboard, before this she actually loved the design and size of it.

Bluetooth, this has been the bain of my existence lately. Every netbook / small laptop I look at and like everything else about seem to not have this. Even on Acer's website it lists bluetooth as being available across all models, and yet the one I've got does NOT have it.


Software side of things are really where I was most disappointed and where my rushed comments come from:

BIOS is a mess, I don't want to get into the ins and outs of this because I have no idea what the BIOS from Intel looks like for the polusbo platform. But just for kicks go ahead and disable to Acer splash screen (show the actual POST screen when the bios starts, not the Acer graphic), when I do this I can no longer boot from a USB drive or from the internal HDD. If you look at the information on the post display it looks like they're using a development build for the platform, could just be how they label their revisions. Overall the BIOS does not look mature to me at all, and I'm sure they'll clean it up in future revisions.

Graphics / chipset driver support is not mature at all. Using aero will create lots of undrawn areas as the screen goes to "grey" as it shows you UAC prompts, along with a host of other "artifacts" left behind by moving windows occasionally. This one has a long list, but in short the drivers just aren't very good for this platform yet, and getting it to work in most Linux distros currently is messy for most people.

Sorry for the long winded post, but if you're trying to decide what to do, I figured I'd explain exactly why I was unhappy. Maybe the things above aren't so important to you, and if you want it for a similar role as hamsterhead then I think the system would be up to those tasks with no problem.

 

I actually have this laptop right now as well, I picked up the AO751h to see if I could justify the extra $250 price premium I paid. There's only a few complaints I have about the DV2, and honestly overall it is a fantastic laptop. With the new updated model having a dual core CPU option, if they just added express card or eSATA it would fit all my checkboxes. Right now I'm still considering sending it back to get the dual core CPU and bluetooth, the CPU I feel would give me another year of use out of it's life.

If you see some fire sales on the DV2 in the next few weeks, don't be surprised. Comparing the DV2 and the AO751h is obviously not apples and oranges, but side by side the footprint and weight is very comparable.

Something to consider about battery life, I got a little over 2.5 hours out of the first few charges and then I installed RMClock to undervolt the CPU. After I got the voltages down to a reasonable level (HP has the cpu at 1.05v for all speeds, range after tweaking is .6725v-.850v) I got about 25-30% more life out of it and considerably less heat while using it. I was happy to cross the 3 hour threshold and still have some life left in it, not a huge change but extra time at no cost is a good deal. Also to note, the early review models had a smaller capacity battery, where the newer ones have a 4910mah battery.

 

Comprehensive reviews of the DV2? Links? I'm searching, Googling up a storm, but if you have particular reviews of interest . . .

Thx--

 

I picked up one of these on Sunday from Walmart.

Personally, I love it. I can definitely see where HaTaX feels that it's rushed, but I would use the term "premature" to describe Intel's Poulsbo/US15W chipset. It's new and Intel licensed elements of the chipset from Imagination Technologies which makes it tricky for Intel from keeping the drivers as up-to-date as they do with their traditional chipsets and integrated graphics.

Negatives:

• 
  * The BIOS issue HaTaX mentioned was frustrating. I formatted and reformatted a USB stick for over an hour to find out that there's a bug in the BIOS.
  * The 751h is so new that there's really no forum-driven, community support yet.
  * As mentioned earlier, drivers are rough - especially if you're going to use linux.
  * Rule OS X out, unless you're cool with no QE. With that said, I could bet money that Apple's new tablet will use the Poulso chipset (or something utilizing the Dual Diamondville/Z) which will yield the hackintosh community some drivers, but that hasn't happened yet.
  * No HDMI output. Personally, I could care less. But with the Poulsbo/US15W chipset, this was probably an option for Acer's design team, but they chose to not use it.

Things I LOVE:

• 
  * 1366x768 screen resolution
  * Though drivers are in the early stage, the Atom Z's video hardware acceleration works well. I can do full screen video while only using around 18-20% CPU. Technically, the Poulsbo chipset supports hardware acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9/VC-1 and H.264 formats. The Atom N series only supported acceleration for MPEG-2.
  * Apparently the Atom Z supports VT-x virtualization support. I know, VMWare on a netbook isn't something that I would want to do, but it's interesting that it's possible.
  * The Poulsbo/US15W chipset and Atom Z processor use much less power which allows for longer battery life. (It would have been nice if the Walmart version included the 6-cell battery to compliment that.)
  * Unlike the 8.9" Apsire One, the 11.6" has two-screw, easy access to the hard drive, communication ports and memory. No onboard/soldered RAM.
  * 2GB RAM, by default (need I say more?)
  * The LED LCD is wonderful. Out of all my LCDs and laptop screens, I'm most satisfied with this one. Nice color gamut, contrast and brightness.
  * Like the 10.1", it uses a newer Synaptics touchpad which features Apple-like gestures like scrolling and pinch/pull. It's not perfect, but does actually make using the touchpad easier than any other laptop. And compared to the 8.9's epic-fail side buttons, this is a HUGE improvement.
  * This one is a bit stupid, but Acer has managed to get their sound output perfect. What I mean by this is that when I plug in my headphones, there's never humming or processor chirping sounds - even at full volume. All Aspire One's are like this and it's commendable that Acer has this one right. I can't even plug in headphones to my $3-4k Dell work laptop because of the CPU chirping and lack-of-proper-grounding hum.
  * I know there's been a lot of comments about the 11.6" size not really falling into the standard netbook size range, but this thing is still tiny. If you haven't been able to physically see one of these, please do. It's super thin, lightweight and minimal. They made the screen larger (as a benefit), but shrunk the thickness (<1") and minimized padding around the LCD and keyboard.
  * Random: Intel and Apple both have a close relationship with Imagination Technologies. The 11.6" netbook uses a version of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX graphics core whereas the iPhone uses Imagination Technologies' PowerVR MBX-Lite graphics core. Again, I really think this relationship with Imagination Technologies might come into play with Apple's new tablet/netbook which could make the 11.6" Aspire One a hackintosh lover's dream.

I hope this helps!
-Josh

 

What? You've got H.264 DXVA working? What OS/software/codec combination?
I've been twisting the arm of the 751, and got it to play 720p by using a stripped-down coreAVC codec and overclocking to 1.55GHz. Hardware-accelerated decoding would be absolutely awesome

 

I've got full screen HD video working flawless too... in windows media play even. XP with the newest drivers from acer's site. I had to tweak a few settings in windows media player, I think I unchecked "overlay mode", which is odd, but it worked after that after adding the codecs using the community codec packs

 

Bols and RiXst3r - what is your intel video driver version?

 

The latest XP driver: 6.14.11.1007.
However, I get a immediate BSOD when trying to use the MPC-HC DXVA decoding. What is your software/codec combination?

 

Bols,

I have the same drivers and I just tried a H264 using MPC-HC with the DXVA decoder on and also received a BSOD instantly. I'm wondering what's happening.

Any ideas?
-Josh

 

6.14.11.1007

 

I guess I'm confused about this GPU rendering. So, if I'm using anything other than DXVA to render (like, ffmpeg), we're positive that it's rendering using the CPU instead of the GPU?

Using h.264-ffmpeg (in MPC-HC) I can easily play an h.264 780p video, full screen while only using 20-30% CPU. With that said, if I try to play a 780p WMV9 video not fullscreen'd, it chops up horribly (maybe it wasn't encoded in the same format the GPU decodes?).

If anyone can help shed some light on this, I would be very appreciative!

 

That sounds weird. I'm pretty sure that ffmpeg (ffdshow, I guess?) will use close to, or more than, 100%cpu on the z520 processor when decoding 720p material. Are you sure that its not a DXVA-codec that is enabled? Right-click on the mpc-hc window while playing, and select "Filters", and you should see what codecs is actually being used.

I have now installed windows 7. MPC-HC now just stops with an error, instead of BSOD'ing. Which is an improvement. Kind of. However, I've tried the Cyberlink Powerdvd 8-codec (still running in mpc-hc), and that actually decodes 720p with just 15-20% cpu. However, there are some major artifacts (sudden blocking and deformation from time to time) on the material I've tried. Could be the encoding (264 level), but that does not really help me.

Update:
I just downloaded the latest vista32 GMA500 drivers directly from intel ( http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...dows Vista* Ultimate, 32-bit version&lang=eng )
that actually fixed the artifacts. Smooth 720p playback, with 20% cpu utilization in mpc-hc. Now, if I could just get bluetooth to work...

 

How about staying on the original topic.
Where can I get Walmart or whoever to sell me a machine???
Walmart has been sitting on this for weeks.
HSN wants an arm and leg for it.
D i c k Miller
Hot Springs Village, AR

 

If you got your model at walmart and it was the 2GB ram, 250GB hard drive model, it most likely does not have bluetooth. Mine didn't and it peeved me off.. :cry:

 

dmillergv,

I bought mine last Sunday at Walmart. They only had the 8.9" and 10.1" models on display, but there were a couple brown-boxes in the locked up area below the display. At that time, I was just trying to get the 10.1" in a not-so-fugly color, and I was wondering what colors were in the brown boxes. I had a rep come over and asked if they could tell me what color Aspire Ones were in the box. They opened the brown boxes to reveal the 11.6" models.

Again, this was last Sunday, so there's a good chance the same thing is happening at your Walmart. Just make sure that you identify every box you see in the locked up area.

-Josh