Acer eMachines eM250-1162 Netbook - 10.1″ LED / Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz / 1GB Ram / 250GB HD / 802.11g/g Wireless LAN / Webcam / Windows 7 Starter Review
I love this netbook so much that I decided to give my very first review here. I purchased the em250 at Walmart for 8. I was not impressed with its performance out of the box mainly because of W7 starter and all the “bloatware” installed. After 3 weeks of trying to speed it up by adding 2GB of ram and uninstalling bloatware I decided to return it to Walmart. I was disappointed to find out that Walmart has a 15 day computer return policy. That is when I researched and decided to format the HD and install W7 Ultimate 32 bit. (Another reviewer mentioned elliptical circles but I have not noticed this on my W7U installation). Alhough this netbook is limited by it’s N270 Atom chip it now is snappy and has unlimited features. Not nearly as quick as my Dell D830 duo dore with W7U but a least twice as fast as the W7 Starter that came with it.
In order to install W7U you will first need to burn 3 DVD Restore Disks from the original HD. I used an external USB DVD burner I purchased and set the bios to boot from the USB DVD burner first. All the drivers are on the W7U disk except for the network controller (wireless card). The Drivers and Applications disk I had created earlier had the missing driver. I just added a 9 cell battery for extended use (6-8 hrs). I would have given it 5 stars if it came with W7 Home Edition installed. This compact netbook now rocks!
