Pre-installed Software and Performance

Our review sample shipped with Windows XP Home Edition, although other available bundles make use of XP Pro or Vista Home Basic. A netbook with Vista sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. If I were you, I'd stick with an XP variant until 7 is out.

The Aspire One 751h comes loaded with a bit more software than necessary in my opinion. All of the usual suspects are present, including Microsoft Works, a 60-day trial of Office and McAfee SecurityCenter. Acer also provides a free trial subscription for online data backup solution Carbonite. I had to question a few other software choices, such as Cyberlink PowerDVD 8, considering the system isn't equipped with an optical drive (not uncommon across the board for manufacturers to include it regardless anyway).

All in all, I ended up uninstalling ~25 various programs that weren't needed, most of which were cheesy games courtesy of Acer Game Zone. Some people may enjoy this added software but for the majority of users, it's nothing more than a nuisance. Fortunately these were removable with no ill effect.

Benchmarks

We conducted a few processor-intensive benchmarks to give you an idea of how the 1.33GHz Atom stacks up against the more traditional 1.60GHz variety, in this case, the original Aspire One netbook.

  Aspire One 8.9" Aspire One 11.6"
     
Super PI Mod 1.5 4M - 7M 45.672 sec 9m 00.140 sec
     
Sandra processor arithmetic    
Agregate arithmetic performance 3.6 GOPS 3.0 GOPS
Dhrystone ALU 4.0 GIPS 3.28 GIPS
Whetstone iSSE3 3.3 GFLOPS 2.79 GFLOPS
     
Sandra processor multimedia    
Aggregate multimedia performance 7.43MPixel/s 6.22MPixel/s
Multimedia Int x8 iSSE3 8.33MPixel/s 7MPixel/s
Multimedia Float x4 iSSE2 6.53MPixel/s 5.46Mpixel/s
Multimedia Double x2 iSSE2 1.21MPixel/s 1MPixel/s

In Super Pi Mod 1.5, we see that the Z520 chip was roughly 1 minute 15 seconds slower than the higher clocked N270 in the 4M test. SiSoft Sandra Processor Arithmetic and Multimedia tests reported similar results, with the 11.6" Aspire One slightly slower across the board.