Beginning to work on my new Intel’s Ultrabook Acer Aspire S3

I just started working on my new Intel Ultrabook and I would like to share my experience. It was a hard work moving all my files from the old laptop to the new one. Tons of files saved in different folders make this task more rigorous (I know. I should use the My Documents folder instead).

After having all my files in an external hard disk and with the list of the programs I used in my hand I started up the Acer Aspire with the purpose of making it my first laptop to work.

It was easy to install and move all my stuff (BTW, I’ll try this time to keep all my files in the My Documents folder) but I wondered about the drivers availability and their downloading easiness and I was surprised because Acer has a good support page and my navigation was perfect. I wanted to mention it because support pages usually make me mad, because many machines have the same model and series, so searching for a particular driver becomes the whole user experience a nightmare. Believe me, I have spent hours in the past in the download, install and uninstall cycle. This time it was a matter of minutes.

With Visual Studio, Project and other software architecture and design tools installed and connected to the WiFi and I was ready for the action.

My first findings working the first hour in the Intel Ultrabook were related to the display, some special keys and the start-up time. From a Software Developer or Manager Viewpoint, having a big resolution means productivity, so the 1366×768 Acer Aspire S3’s display resolution makes a pretty good job. Keyboard is also crucial for a techie looking for increased productivity, so it was nice to see the Fn key, the Ctrl key and others in the correct place.

While working I was interrupted by team members to ask me questions so I stopped working in the Ultrabook a couple of times but when I came back to start it I could feel delighted with what “Instant On” and “Instant Connect” means. It’s basically changing from the sleep mode to start up in one second.

I also could see that the RAM memory consumption was never higher than 1.4 GB with many programs open. I make emphasis on this because on with my old laptop, Windows used to spend 2.0 GB (running alone). There is a picture below of memory consumption.

I wanted to test other Intel Ultrabook aspects like battery life and compilation time. I’m a frequent traveler. For me the airports terminals are productive spaces. At the time of this writing I’m flying a journey from JFK to SEA (almost 5 hours) and it’s the first time I can work on full-power. This means that in the past I also was able to work in the airplane but in saving mode with a low  brightness display and low processor power. I always wanted to work with full power but I used to sleep because the battery life was not enough. Now, with the Acer Aspire S3 I had to sleep because I worked during the flights (12 hours, with a small recharge between connections) and the computer battery is still relaxed and I was really tired.

By other hand, I also have been using the Ultrabook for designing and analyzing software architecture problems with many tools, one of them is Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (VS2010). Running VS2010 is straightforward and quick. I generated dependency graphs and compiled solutions. Compiling in VS2010 a solution with 13 projects takes 15 seconds. That’s a good number compared with the one minute or so I used to need.

I’ll go deeper in the next post; I want to analyze the performance of the Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook in long running processes. Thank you.

Disclosure of material connection: I received one or more of the products or services mentioned above for free in the hope that I would mention it on my blog. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe my readers will enjoy. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”.