back to article Acer Aspire 1825PT 11.6in touchscreen notebook

Some years ago, I made a fool of myself by describing Microsoft's ultimately doomed Tablet PC concept as a good idea. My saving grace was that I wasn't as dim as all the Tablet PC manufacturers, who chose to overprice their own products out of existence. Acer Aspire 1825PT Acer's Aspire 1825PT: if only Tablet PCs had always …

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  1. Andre 3
    WTF?

    CD Drive

    WTF is up with the Reg Hardware reviewer and banging on about "missing" CD drives? I have one in my laptop and used it last over 6 months ago. Windows 7 can be installed from USB, and almost everything else can be downloaded or sent via email. Please get the reviewers to state WHY they NEED a CD drive?!

  2. Inertia

    CD's are so 90's.

    http://edge.technet.com/Media/Installing-Win7-using-a-USB-Stick/

  3. TheBloke

    Easy to replace HDD for SSD?

    Is it easy to replace the HDD with an SSD?

    I am quite tempted by this little device. But getting rid of that 5400 RPM rubbish and putting in a proper SSD would be an essential upgrade for me. I can't live with HDD slowness and unreliability any more. Plus an SSD would boost the battery life a bit.

  4. Alastair Dodd 1
    Happy

    What about the Hp Touchsmart TM2?

    Give this a review, about £50 quid more than this acer, has built in wacom tablet with multitouch, comes with USB DVD burner, bigger screen similar power CPU/RAM/HD but added ATi 4550 mobile graphics so will even play Left 4 Dead!

    I have one, sweet machine, and no I don't work for HP...

  5. BingBong
    FAIL

    Touchscreen Ubuntu?

    Windows 7 meh, not bothered about Windows even if it is the most reasonable version since NT 3.51. What about sticking Ubuntu on it, what's the touchscreen support like for that? (even with the netbook remix big icons which works a treat on a 7" 1st gen Asus eee netbook).

    From a touchscreen point of view if its too heavy to hold and wobbles about if you have it on a desk then really what use is the touchscreen apart from being a bit gimmicky? The iPad is light, fast, long battery life and well suited to mobile applications (e.g. form filling, presentations, email, browsing, watching tv on the loo) and for the same price you get the top end device .. so I'm not sure if its worth the extra few hundred on top of a normal notebook price for the touchscreen element of the Acer even though I'm sure the hardware build is good .. its stuck in the same mould as the other Bill Gates Tablets of old albeit with a better hardware spec ... its just not as touchy or mobily as an iPad, hmm.

    The only time I use a CD/DVD drive these days is for ripping media or a new OS install, everything else comes over the network (Wifi,3G or wired) and if you don't trust an outsourced cloud then just connect a NAS or file server (I've a NFS'ed ZFS server with 9Tb of RAIDZed usable space) and run it yourself. USB DVD drives are really cheap if you don't go for the ultra slimline versions and you only need one 8-)

  6. James Hughes 1

    Playing DVD's

    Might be a useful reasons for a DVD drive? Not everyone rips (or knows how to rip) to a USB stick.

    1. Inertia

      then..

      ...they probably shouldn't be reinstalling windows on bare-metal. :)

    2. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Why bother with a DVD drive?

      Ripping isn't exactly rocket surgery, certainly no more than ripping CDs.

      A PC netbook is likely to have a very large harddrive (much larger than what comes on that other table). So you can put quite a bit of content on a netbook. You can be well set for distraction even when you are completely off the grid.

      A keyboard is still king for stuff like "filling in forms".

      Actually, Apple has made the gap between it's tablet and a netbook a lot wider than it needs to be.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Would rather a touchscreen netbook

    All

  8. Wang N Staines

    OK

    Stopped reading after the word Windows!!!!

  9. AlanGriffiths
    Linux

    Linux?

    I've not run windows on my own kit (outside a VM) for a couple of years. What are the options here?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    It's not an iPad.

    I've had one of these for a couple of weeks - it's a nice machine with a good keyboard and decent ports. iPad's great if you don't need those. The screen's quite shiny - which some people wouldn't like - but crisp with a good resolution. It's been reviewed and photographed at www.umpcportal.com and the HD looks to be accessible. Acer 1825PTZ is down-specced but cheaper.

  11. meehawl

    "At last, a Tablet PC done right" - HP Tm2

    Yes, it was "done right" over six months ago when HP brought out the Tm2. Basically, all the same specs as this Acer but cheaper, plus hybrid switchable discrete/integrated gfx (ATI and Intel). It looks sexier, it's cheaper, and you can boot OSx86 on it to get the OSX experience on a tablet that does not suck.

  12. mrmond
    WTF?

    how much for a DVD drive ?

    £66 ? You're kidding right ?

    I got mine brand new on Amazon for about £20.

  13. g e
    WTF?

    Restore disc?

    Does the HD not have a restore partition tucked away on it? My Aspire ONE notebook does, a full factory restore is just a CTRL+F10 (or something) away at boot time.

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      And if it's the HDD that failed?

      Restore partitions are utterly useless - I'd rather have the space and a real optical disc or USB stick around.

  14. StartledPancake

    Tablet PC review that doesnt discuss tablet features

    Any info on how sensitive the screen is or if there are dead areas near the edges? The stuff on the CDROM drive is just trolling in a review to generate comments, surely.

  15. Spoonguard
    FAIL

    Windows tablets didn't fail due to being underspec'd

    They failed because most tablets had crap sensors that couldn't be justified with their increased cost.

    Also you would think they wpuld include a capacitive stylus or something. Tablets are supppsed to be. for handwriting.

  16. Gary F
    Thumb Up

    Had this tablet for a month now - mini review

    Bought mind from simplyacer.com for £510 +VAT a month ago. I thought the touchscreen would be a bit of a gimmick but have found it so much more intuitive and easier to interact with windows and icons using my finger - far less effort than using the smallish touchpad.

    The screen is quite sensitive and the onscreen keyboard isn't as bad as I thought for typing, although I always switch to the real keyboard for extensive CMD prompt or email stuff.

    I used it in a datacentre in tablet mode in portrait with the virtual keyboard at the bottom of the screen. It's the nearest I'll get to being a Star Trek engineer with a touch pad mobile device, connecting it into switches to interact with LANs, walking around using wifi to talk with engineers and most importantly to order from Pizza Hut online.

    After 2 weeks of light use a piece of rubber fell off that helps to lock the screen flush after coming out of tablet mode. Not good. I've pushed it back in and because I'm now VERY mindful of it there hasn't been a problem since.

    As an ordinary laptop it's terrific. Very small, lovely hi-res screen, lots of ram, fast cpu and 9 hours of battery life if used economically. As a tablet it's impressive and Windows 7 makes it far more usable in this format than previous releases. It will impress people, especially using Microsoft Surface (pre-installed). The MS Bing/Globe/Map app is very cool to interact with but is inferior to Google Earth in terms of features. But Google Earth (like Chrome) is totally unaware of gestures and sucks in tablet mode.

    The Register's reviewer was very harsh to criticise the lack of a DVD drive. IT DOESN'T NEED ONE! Microsoft have a free tool that lets you create a USB stick to install Windows from. I have a 8GB stick for that purpose with the MS Office setup file on it as well, plus other favourite software. Bish, bosh, job done! It installs quicker from USB than DVD anyway. (All licensed I must add!)

    I get his point about not being able to recover Windows if it dies, I would be annoyed about that if I didn't have my own licensed copy of Windows to install in the event of it going t*ts up.

  17. Gabor Laszlo
    WTF?

    Fujitsu Lifebook T4220

    Look it up. I've been using it for years, and this acer still loses to it by any criteria meaningful to my use pattern.

  18. David Simpson 1
    FAIL

    Flawed Graphs

    Your performance graphs make no sense ! Give us the actual CPUs each of the notebooks use not just the speed, the yellow bar which is "1.6GHz" is obviously an Atom but I have no idea if the other CPUs are Core2, Celeron or Penium Dual Core !

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