Acer Aspire One AO756-4411 Notebook Intel Pentium 987(1.5GHz) 11.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD 5400rpm Intel HD Graphics

Pros: Lots of RAM, great CPU for a netbook, crisp screen, thin and light, pretty big hard drive

Cons: Tinny speakers, so-so battery, finicky spacebar

Other Thoughts: My 4 year old Toshiba laptop finally bit the dust recently and I decided to replace it with this netbook. I knew I wanted a netbook because of the portability, and this seemed to have the best bang to buck ratio. It doesn't disappoint. The screen has excellent color and is crisp and clear (although there is a bit of flashlighting on dark screens). The keyboard is nicely spaced and surprisingly easy to type on, save a spacebar that is a little weird (you have to hit it a little harder than I was used to). The trackpad is one solid piece which can be clicked down at the corners. The 720p screen resolution is a nice addition, but keep in mind you may need to up the text size, 720p on an 11 inch screen makes text surprisingly small. Other than that, it has met all my needs. 4GB is fine for running Windows 8, however I'll probably just install Windows 7 at some point. My biggest complaint is the HORRIBLE speaker. I'm thinking there's only one, and it is shockingly bad. A lot worse than my cell phone. At max volume, I can barely hear it, and it sounds muffled and tinny. Not that I'll use sound much, but if you plan on using the speakers at all, you will probably want another laptop. Overall, this is a solid laptop. Comparing it to my Toshiba, which suffered from horrible, flimsy build quality and materials, this thing feels nice and solid.

Pros: Compact, decent plug/port locations, exterior finish diminishes fingerprints and minor scratches, quiet, quick and copious HDD.

Cons: UEFI, Windows 8, battery life, inner case materials

Other Thoughts: I bought this for something better than a tablet yet still portable to use all around my house. I couldn't be happier with it in that aspect.

No touchscreen capabilities, so Windows 8 interactions were quite cumbersome for someone who still just wants a desktop. It boots on par with my Windows 7 desktop on a SSD, though the Acer is now running Linux and also was in that comparison.

I expected a little better battery life out of it, but I use it mostly for power hungry wireless internet access so you can't expect much at this price level (sadly).

This unit is a secondary computer for me so it has seen fairly minimal use since I've bought it. However I have already noticed wear on the case surface to the right of the mouse's touch pad where I use it to scroll along windows. I bought an Acer Ferrari years ago and this sort of wear didn't show for years, and that was a primary computer for me back then.

My example also has keys that snap/pop depending on how you strike them. I'm a gentle typer, but it still sounds like I'm breaking my keys whenever I type.

I also opted to max the RAM since both computer and RAM wasn't terribly expensive together, and I'd recommend doing the same.

Pros: Great laptop, small, light, battery is half decent, keyboard is most comfortable given it's size, any smaller and you sacrifice keyboard comfort significantly, fairly powerful, accepts 8GB of RAM easily, EASY to work on

Cons: Windows 8 is TERRIBLE, it's a laptop so you can't build it yourself meaning you have to deal with the awful companies (and their "support") who make it. SSD replacement of the HDD takes a few minutes of reading and exploring, it'll initially give you "Nonbootable disk" error, read "Other thoughts:" for a fix on installing an SSD into your AO756-4411

Other Thoughts: My previous AO756 (an AO756-2617, Celeron model with a smaller HDD) was ultra easy to get a SSD into and add more RAM. After breaking it by introducing it to coffee (oh yeah don't do that), I found this is it's successor.

When you put the SSD in right away as I said above you get a nonbootable disk error. Reboot and quickly tap F2 until you get into BIOS, head over to the "Boot" section and switch from UEFI to Legacy BIOS and viola, your SSD works perfectly now.

This is stupid and it's more horrible Windows 8 cancer. Now put some *nix on that netbook and never look back!

Pros: Nice specs, light, Windows 8 is OK once you get used to it.

Cons: Bad bad keyboard. When delivered it was full of crud and had to be airblasted out. Space bar is small and won't register hits to the bottom 1/3 of the bar (although it will still give tactile feedback). I would never have bought this laptop if I'd had a chance to try the keyboard out ahead of time.

There's a helper app for the touchpad that consumes 50% of the CPU after every reboot until killed. It can be disabled at startup but then you lose touchpad gesture commands like multi-touch scrolling. Killing it afterwards doesn't seem to affect the gestures, so there is a workaround, but it's still boneheaded.

Pros: Pretty good specs for its size and price. Very light.

Cons: Windows 8 is a bit of a disaster, although I like the Reset feature.

UEFI implementation makes it impossible to set up dual boot with Linux. You can switch to legacy BIOS (and can't boot Windows 8) or UEFI (and can't boot Linux). What you can't do is keep UEFI but turn off Secure Boot: that option is grayed out.

Keyboard is a little loud and crackly.

Battery is small, and there don't seem to be aftermarket extended batteries for this model yet.

Pros: Just use Classic Shell or a number of other free UI that replace.

Cons: Make sure you set the options so Metro doesn't come on first.

Pros: Very small and lightweight. So little, I could put it in a bookcase and forget it was there.

The hardware specs are pretty good for a machine that size. I wish I had that level of hardware in some of my other machines now.

Cons: Windows 8 is awful.

The speakers on the machine are terrible. I know I know, you're going to say it's a tiny laptop what do you expect. I expect the speakers on a laptop to be at least as good as the speakers on my tablet, which a side-by-side comparison proved that they weren't. There's no excuse for manufacturers cheaping out on speakers anymore. Tablet speakers prove you can get decent quality out of small packages. There's no reason for accepting sound out of a tin can any more.

The size while listed as a pro, can in fact be a con too. This machine was so small that I was concerned that functionality would be impaired.

Other Thoughts: I bought this to be a general use laptop for the family. School work and light web surfing and such.

My family are all Mac users, so I knew the Windows 8 OS would be a hard sell, but Windows 8 is simply awful. The Metro UI belongs on tablets and phones, not laptops or desktops. The gesture functions were embedded in the OS, which meant that if I hit the mouse wrong (which seemed to be all the time) it would kick into some Metro UI element that I wanted no part of. Even when I dove down under Metro UI to get to the desktop, no start button meant using the desktop was a hassle and if I hit the trackpad wrong, the gesture functions took me straight back into the Metro UI. I've been a Windows user for 20 years now and I hate everything about Windows 8. There's no Aero functionality in it, because Microsoft wanted to pare down the OS so that it could work well on tablets and phones,and so even the bells and whistles from Windows 7 are all gone. Windows 8 is getting filed in the same place as Windows Vista, and Windows ME before it. I won't be upgrading to it on any of my machines.

A huge disappointment as the machine itself wasn't a bad machine, save for the speakers, as mentioned above.

Pros: 3 lbs--much lighter than most laptops. It is smaller than laptops but big enough to show webpages better than tablets.

With a Pentium processor (so it is faster than most netbook processors) and 4 gigs of memory and good sized hard drive, it's a good computer when you are on the move.

Cons: Windows 8 user-interface is a bummer. But for nothing you can download "Classic Shell" which makes it look similar to any pre-Win 8 computer. Make sure you turn off the Windows program that stops you from using programs that it doesn't know about. It took me a while to figure out.

Pros: Pentium 987 ulv at 1.5 ghz. Literally. the most powerful netbook available thus far. One screw bottom panel access. Intel HD graphics (instead of the GMA series) chiclet keyboard feels decent enough.

Cons: shiny bezel around the screen. shiny screen.
doesn't have the firm metal chassis one sees in recent ultrabooks, but it's a sub $400 netbook, can't have it all.
Wants a 7mm thick 2.5" drive for those of you looking to swap out the spinner for an SSD. Battery seems a bit small...I'm averaging about 5 hours of light use, web surfing and stuff.

Very minor quibbles so far which I feel doesn't warrant an egg off

Other Thoughts: This is the final evolution of the netbook.

Fantastic bang for your buck. Does everything well except 3D gaming.
Does 1080p videos, streaming 1080p videos well.
On a lark, I installed WoW and I can even play that at lowish (tweaked) settings at 15+ fps