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Acer Aspire One gets dissected

by on07 July 2008

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XP and OS X work on it

The brand new Acer Aspire One has already been ripped apart by an eager user and pictures got posted on the Mobile 01 forum for the rest of us to have a look at. It's actually quite different to both the MSI Wind and the Asus Eee PC range, more so than you'd think.

First and foremost, it's a pain to upgrade the memory, as there's no external access to the memory slot. Normally notebooks have an easy access hatch to the memory slot(s), but Acer decided to skip this. So if you want to upgrade your memory, especially if you buy a 512MB version, then you have to rip the machine apart to get to the memory slot.

There are four memory chips soldered onto the top of the PCB, but the memory slot is located at the bottom of the PCB, which doesn't seem like a very thought through solution by Acer. Speaking of which, Acer is using a proprietary SSD drive interface and the SSD drive, if you can call it that, connects via a ribbon cable to the main PCB.

This means that unlike the Eee PC, which uses PCIe based SSD drives, there's little hope of ever being able to upgrade the Acer One's internal storage memory. There's also a mysterious hatch at the bottom of the notebook that seems to be for some kind of external PCIe module, but with the PCIe interface missing. According to the user, there was no explanation in the manual what the space was meant for.

The same user also managed to install Windows XP on the SSD, while another forum member installed OS X on his Aspire one.

You can find all of the pictures here and the OS X pictures here (note: you have to click on the little links spread across to post to see the pictures)
Last modified on 07 July 2008
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