Acer Aspire One D255E- ultra light and slim entry level netbook

The Acer Aspire One D225E is an entry level netbook from Acer, part of the successful Aspire One series. It’s a 10 inch netbook with a rather basic hardware line up, but it compensates with a good design and great autonomy.

The D225E is made out of plastic and has a 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning it’s much easier to slide in a bag than 4:3 machines. It has a rather glossy finish on the back, which is not necessarily a good point on the long term, as you’ll have to clean the fingerprints and smudges of it quite often.

One of the main advantages of the D225E it’s that the device is both thin and light. The netbook is about an inch thick and weighs about 2.5 pounds (4 cell battery version). After all, for a netbook it’s so important to be easy to carry around, even if the performance it delivers can’t match that of a laptop or desktop PC.

The screen of the netbook has a 10 inch diagonal and a standard, 1024 x 600 resolution. It’s not the best resolution you can get on a 10 incher these days, but it’s high enough to display rich web pages and documents without having to zoom in.

The screen comes with a standard 1024 x 600 resolution

The netbook has a very large keyboard, with big keys, but enough space between them in order to avoid typos. The touch pad is also quite big, being as long as the space bar and reaching the end of the palm rest. The D225E comes with an Intel Atom N455 processor, which has a single core running at 1.66 GHZ. After the N450, this is the second entry of single core Atom processors, and offers a more balanced experience in terms of performance and power management. The processor is helped out by 1 GB of DDR3 RAM, but you can upload to 2 GB, which is also the maximum capacity of the memory controller.

There’s also a standard 250 GB hard disk drive with a spin speed of 5.400 rpm, but there’s also a 320 GB version to look at if you want. There’s also an integrated video accelerator, that can help with some video playback, but don’t expect gaming or something similar, as the machine can’t quite take it, frankly. The netbook also has a 1.3 MP HD web cam, which is a bonus addition on an entry level netbook. It’s of course superior to the 0.3 MP cameras we usually have on netbooks and can deliver great performance for video calling.

The large keyboard allows for typo free action

The D225E also comes with WiFi N, a protocol 5 times faster than “normal” WiFi, not to say also more reliable. The operating system on board Windows 7 Starter, that is a light weight version of Windows.  One of the weak points of the netbook is the 3 cell battery, that delivers only 4 hours of autonomy, a rather modest number for a portable computer these days.

The D225E has a second version, that comes with a N550 dual core processor and a 6 cell battery, that can deliver about 8-9 hours of battery life. Of course, it’s a little more expensive than the single core version, but you get better performance and longer battery life. Other system specs are identical between the two versions. Overall, the D225E, both the single core, 4 cell battery, going for about 230 bucks and the dual core, 6 cell battery variant that costs a little over $260 are good and affordable entries in the netbook sector.

You can choose your D225E from a bunch of different colors

They come in an ultra thin and ultra light package, as well as having a great keyboard and a 16:9 aspect ratio, that’s easier to handle and carry around. The price difference between the two versions is not very big, so you might want to go directly for the dual core version, that also has a much better battery.