My Acer Aspire One A150 has been my on-the-run computer for close to a ear now and I really enjoy the experience you get with a netbook. There is however a lot you can do to further improve the experience, both hardware-wise and software-wise.

Hardware

I haven’t done any internal hardware modifications, but loving accessories I have made my AAO a but more useful with external add-ons.

Battery

The first thing I bought for it was a 6 cell battery, which gives me about 5 hours use. Combine that with the 2 hours from the 3 cell battery that came with it and I can go all day without having to worry about finding a wall socket (I don’t even carry the charger anywhere). It’s a must-have for any netbook and the single most important thing you can get for yours.

Decal

For decorative purposes I ordered a vinyl decal with the Stargate Atlantis logo off ebay which gives the AAO a look, like the gear they use on the show. Not really that useful, but still nice, and there are a LOT of skins out there both like the one I have and full body skins. My favorite decal store, decalgirl, also sells skins for the AAO (however I haven’t tried any as I like my Stargate logo).

Bag

For a long time I used a laptop backpack I bought for my 15″ Dell Inspiron 1501 to carry my AAO as I couldn’t find a good perfect fit netbook bag that was also reasonably priced. Then mymemory.co.uk started selling bags and cases from Aha, including netbook bags. I got the Aha 8.9″ – 10.2″ Netbook Bag – Digital for £12 (free shipping anywhere) which is an awesome deal for an awesome case. It didn’t have a shoulder strap however, so I grabbed one from my old Dell laptop shoulder bag and put it on. It fits the AAo perfectly, has room for a mouse and some accessories (including the extra battery) and most importantly it’s not excessively big.

Mouse

I hate wires and large wireless adapters for laptop use so when it was time to get a mouse for the AAO I went with a Logitech VX Nano. Besides being an awesome mouse (I even use one at home) it has the smallest receiver on the market, so I don’t have to take it out when I move and it just stays in there 24/7. That’s an awesome feature on a netbook! Nowadays there are cheaper Logitech mice with this receiver and you can also get tiny Bluetooth adapters and use a Bluetooth mouse, but I still like the VX Nano simply because it’s awesome.

External memory

Even though I have the A150 model AAO with 120GB HDD, I like to use external memory with it both for backup and in case I need to transfer files. In the left side SD card reader I use a 2GB SanDisk Ultra II SD card which with it’s awesome speed (15MB/s write) is an excellent way of quickly moving files between the AAO and my home PC. I also use a Kawau tiny microSD reader which is even smaller than the VX Nano receiver. I have a 2GB card in it at the moment, but I grabbed a Lexar Class 4 8GB microSDHC cardfor £10 on sale from mymemory a few days ago which will sit it in. The reader/card combo will be my new “always with me” pendrive in case I need to transfer large files to anyone, or send something with people home etc (which happens a lot since people around me appear to be too dumb to get shit themselves). If the AAO was a starship, the 2GB SD card would be the escape pod while the 8GB reader/card flashdrive would be the shuttlecraft (yei for Star Trek metaphors).

Software

Desktop

For the desktop I wanted a bit more clean of a look with my low resolution AAO than I have with the dual screen home PC. I installed Rocketdock, an application that gives you a highly customizable MacOS-style application dock on a Windows machine. I then removed all icons from the desktop (to remove the Recycle Bin in Windows XP Home you need the Microsoft program TweakUI) and put on a new wallpaper. I configured the whole setup to do the following:

• Start menu bar in Windows auto-hides
• Rocketdock auto-starts on bootup
• Rocketdock auto-hides
• Minimized apps show in Rocketdock, noticable in the screenshot if you look at the right side of the dock after the second seperator).
• Running apps are marked in Rocketdock by a small arrow, noticable in the screenshot with the mIRC, Gtalk, Pidgin and Photoshop icons. Clicking a running app will bring up the open window, NOT launch another copy of the application.
• Recycle bin, clock and a battery life docklet (widget) is located behind their own seperators in Rocketdock.
• Icons zoom bubble-style when you hover over them (second screenshot).

It works very well and gives the AAO that nice Mac-feel to it, as well as it freeing up screen real estate by not needing the start meny bar. Looks awesome and works very well.

FireFox

The 1024×600 resolution on the AAO is really annoying for webbrowsing because the various toolbars take up so much vertical space. You can use full screen mode, but that’s annoying too because you lose the bookmarks toolbar which is what I use most of the time.

The solution to this is a plugin called AutoHide. It allows you to decide what shows and what hides or doesn’t display at all in fullscreen mode, including the various toolbars. i have mine set to always display bookmarks and tabs (meaning they don’t even hide like normal fullscreen mode) with the address bar being hidden, meaning it pops up only when I hover over the top of the window. I also have it to always display the status bar, the thin little bar at the bottom which a lot of plugins like Firebug, Xmarks and Download Statusbar uses for shortcuts (you can only see Xmarks in the screenshot as I had just installed the two others and not restarted the browser).

This works perfectly as it frees up a lot of vertical space and gives you way more screen real estate than ruinning FireFox normally. The two screenshots below show the difference.