Inspi

Incredibly frustrated by this netbook now, I thought that I could just install loads of neat and useful software to my Acer Aspire One wot I bought the other week as a replacement for my regular laptop when it died.

But alas, its not so simple.

I wanna do a really neat post-it note animation, I've been having 3D Monster Chase dreams it was this Doom-like game for the Amstrad CPC 464 twenty-five years ago, and my boredom tolerance has reached the point where I could draw the maze and animate running around it, but alas, my scanner doesnae work with this operating system, and besides I have no animation software or out that can stitch jpgs into mpgs.

I've got half a dozen songs in ma heid which I need to record and sling up, but there's no pre-loaded software to do it and I can't find owt that works with this variety of Linux. There's mic socket on the side, but thats no use, and the built in mic only seems to work for the webcam. Christ, it lets you record video from the webcam, but its impossible to do anything with the video.

I was talking to some musicy chap last night about the various music scenes and promoters around London, and after my mind boggled for a while I figured it would be neat to do some kind of hookup network diagram, linking bands to promoters, but its not to be with this OS.

Its been ages since I did any ill theatre drawings, my graphics tablet doesn't have drivers for this machine, and I can't just draw stuff on paper and scan it. I guess I could draw with biro, then take a photie then dick around with the gimp, but thats just too convoluted.

Playing MP3s is a bitch, the pre-loaded MP3 player is an ass, it takes forever to look at my removeable hard disc cos there's a few thousand more files than it can handle. I installed VLC which is some kind of free media player, but from the Acer website it appears to not have any codecs loaded, so its no good to anyone. What was the name of that open source media player, Songbird?

There's not IRC client easily available. I fear I may never enter the Bowlie chatroom again, my friends there long gone, lost into the ether. Truly this is the time Bowlie finally died.

Oh, and fucking hell, I have no CD burning facilities no more.

What happened? When did computers suddenly stop working? Its like we're back to 1993 technology where you never know if whatever you've bought, or downloaded is going to work, and you have to scrabble around for days trying to plug everything together and set ever thing up.

I have less than no money, can some PC company send me a computer that works, I promise I'll sing its praises from all of my websites and everything I can use it to create.

**UPDATE**
Oh and fucking hellski, I can't even watch The IT Crowd on Channel 4's catch up service cos it only supports Windows PCs. It's kind of like both of my legs and one of my arms have been tied behind my back and three of the fingers on my remaining hand are taped together, and my eyes, like I'm wearing some steampunk Cyberdog glasses with horns coming out.

Acer Aspire One - review after a few hours

It was the cheapest one in the shop. I tried PC World (spit) first but despite doing the eye thing on about a dozen of the milling around serving folk, none of them asked if they could help me, so I wandered into Currys next door, and got about three folk flocking to my side when I'd identified my required aisle.

So I just wanted a cheap laptop, something I could check email, surf the net, run open office and write the great British novel. They had Advent netbooks, Acer netbooks and Asus netbooks, all below £350. The Advent one had a bad looking keyboard, all flat with indistinct buttons. I'd been fantasising about owning an EEEPC for a long time, but when it came to it, the 12Gb hard disc seemed a little weedy compared to the Acer's 120Gb, hmm maybe that was a typo.

My budget didn't quite stretch into getting a Windows machine, or at a pinch the machine would be too low specced to run it as well as I'd like, and no way, no way was I going to get a Vista machine, that way lies madness.

So here I have an Acer Aspire One, half a gig of ram, 120Gb disc space, some version of linux, its not Ubuntu, some mysterious file structure.

Its pretty neat, its surf the web okay, but there's lots of wee things that need tightening up.

Like if I was some secret agent like Jason Bourne and needed to buy a wee netbook to slip into a passer-by's pocket for some convoluted reason, this wouldn't do the job.

• Unable to do MSN messenger on the wee built in messenger thing.
• The pre-installed MP3 player is crap and takes forever to clock my external hard-drive's MP3 archive
• The pre-installed OpenOffice suite doesn't have open office base
• Its an old version of OpenOffice version 2.3 when they're up to version 3.0 even 2.4 would be nice, but its not intuitive to update
• No built in audio software to use the mic
• The built in photo software is a bit crap and its not intuitive how to install gimp
• It doesn't want to update Firefox to the latest version
• Didn't recognise my usb graphics table thing when I plugged it in.
• When the battery runs low it just switches off rather than tells you you're running low
• Wait, my ipod isn't going to work with this, is it?
• The SD memory card slots don't lock the cards in, there's some kind of spring mechanism, but you can just pull them out.
• Does the fan really need to be on all the time?