Acer Aspire One 522-BZ897

Acer Aspire One 522-BZ897

The Acer Aspire One 522 (model BZ897) delivers a good, classic netbook for a very reasonable price ($330 as of March 18, 2011). Petite and slim with a handsome 10.1-inch widescreen LED-backlit display, a 250GB hard drive, an integrated 1.3-megapixel webcam, and a multitouch touchpad, this portable does a solid job with multimedia and boasts pretty good battery life: nearly 7 hours in our tests using the provided 6-cell battery. If you're looking for anything approaching ultraportable-class computing power, you won't find it here. Outfitted with AMD's new 1 GHz Fusion C50 dual-core CPU, 1GB of DDR3 1066 MHz RAM (of which 256mb is reserved for the integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics) and Windows 7 Starter Edition, the Aspire One 522 turned in a puny 32 on our WorldBench test, slightly worse than some Intel Atom-powered competitors and well below most dual-core notebooks. (You might get more oomph by upgrading the memory to the supported 2GB of RAM.) Gaming scores were also poor, even for a netbook. Still, while I wouldn't want to run large spreadsheets or edit video on the Aspire One 522, it's quite adequate for watching web video or making a video call.