Review: Acer Aspire One 522-BZ897 Netbook

Reviewer Yardena Arar praises this Acer netbooks long battery life (7 hours), good screen and attractive price, but points out that it scored poorly on benchmark performance tests.

"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."