Unfortunately the fan noise on the MSI Wind u100 netbook was unbearable, thus I was force to sell my netbook. I love my MacBook Pro, but even at 13 inches, I at thought at times that it was to bulky to carry around on my man purse. I was seriously looking on purchasing an 11 inch MacBook Air, but the price was just to high for the hardware that I’m getting. I researched some of the 11 inch Dell notebooks/netbooks, but it appears that Dell is selling them with AMD chips. Given the long and bad history that I’ve had owning laptops with AMD chips in them, I was forced to look elsewhere.

On my weekly visit to Microcenter I saw the Acer TimelineX on display and immediately tarted analyzing its specs. At $699 with an Intel Core i5 (1.2Ghz), 4 GB DDR3 RAM and a 500GB 5400 rpm, I decided to buy the notebook that same day with even without researching its Linux hardware compatibility. The laptop came with Windows 7 Home Edition, so immediately once I powered up the laptop I installed Ubuntu.

With Ubuntu, the only problem that I had was getting the wireless to work. This was something that didn’t surprised me given that the laptop has a Broadcom wireless chipset. Luckily, enabling the restricted wireless driver got the wireless working. The laptop runs dead silent and haven’t problem hibernating and resuming on the computer. The only quirk when resuming back, even from screen saver, is that I have to manually trigger the keys to turn on the wireless card. Other than that, this little computer runs Ubuntu really well and at half the cost of a MacBook Air!!

Also, I have the ability to upgrade to 8 GB’s of RAM and add an SSD drive if I decide too, can MacBook Air owners do that? haha…