This reminds me of when my parents bought an acer netbook in 2009. The display stopped working in literally 3 months.

I remember a friend in school got one of these for homework. It was sad seeing her trying to play Plants VS Zombies on it. Incidentally, Plants VS Zombies actually ended up killing the laptop later on. Overheating issues. She was so excited to get a laptop, unfortunately what she got was this...

LOWSPECGAMER WE NEED YOU!

OMG THAT SEGA GT MUSIC!!!! i thought i was the only one who even knew that game existed.

It's funny how Wolfenstein 3D, a game from the 90's can't even run on this thing. I even added an extra gb of ram and it still wouldn't run well. It was super choppy and unplayable.

If you installed XP , your gaming performance would increase by a bit. GMA 950 XP drivers are way better. I had a GMA 950 for gaming, so i had to test it.. It runs san andreas on medium at HD :)

The netbook of my childhood. This little beast was my "gaming" machine from 2009 until 2012

But can it run *CRYSIS*

I would say not impossible at first, before watching this video

It's interesting that you brought these things up. I use my atom based netbook for the internet all the time. I've set up network sharing through ethernet to my actual PC as it doesn't have WiFi. My netbook is a router with a screen. Funny to think I used to use it for Nintendo 64 emulation and actually got some decent performance on some games.

You don't know true pain mine's 10 years old, only upgraded the ram

As the owner of one of these, i always wanted to overclock the CPU if it would be possible. I also played Runescape extensively with it, and even got 3-10 fps in the most recent Runescape version as well. I am however gonna recommend STRONGLY to enable a tool like "net balancer", and forcibly limit runescape to a super low bandwidth for your internet. 15-3 kbps or just 4kbps should be the max, as for then Runescape does NOT download and enable higher details at all. Which makes modern Runescape (rs3) actually playable for an old RPG title. Almost nobody will likely give this advice however, as for nobody would ever try what i just told you. But i did because i was forced to make my 3GB data cap last a few years back, and this became the result. Nonetheless, it is incredibly weak and i would be ultra-happy if i could have found out how to overclock the GPU and CPU. Hell, i'd not mind re-applying thermal pads and give it better thermals while i was at it. I am a tinker fanatic like that. Use or discard this comment as you see fit, cheers.

The netbook may be dumb and slow, but at least most of them are upgradable with SSD, additional Ram slots, and replaceable battery. Portable laptops nowadays tend to go Thinner & Lighter and almost all of them are not customizable at all. Even batteries are not replaceable anymore. I wish they bring back netbook concept (7-10" screen) with today's modern processor and computing power. Imagine having a Netbook today equipped with AMD Ryzen, upgradable Ram, and SSD storage.

I watched this video, thought "wow, tiny laptop, cool!" And bought one. Bad idea. Then I bought 108 of them for £500. That was a bad deal.

I love hearing squidward playing the clarinet

You should try the HP2000. It's also a 5 year old laptop and I've had it since it came out. Sort of pathetic, but it can run all games up until 2004 and some recent low to mid-req games very well. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, for example, ran at a stable 30fps with medium settings and shadows disabled(res: 1366x768), only dropping down to 15fps when smoke grenades or missiles were used.

i just sold one of these on ebay this exact model only with a 160gb hard drive, i can agree that even installing linux on this was so much effort.

Brings me back, had a Acer Aspire One netbook for about a year and a half back then as an emergency PC. Because of the new novelty of smartphones at the time I did all my tinkering on Android at the time and didn't use the PC much for a few years. Kind of wish I kept it to play with nowadays. I remember putting Lubuntu on it just to get it in a semi useable state. 🤣

Also, CS 1.6 would have been a better choice than CS Source...

you installed win7. that's already the wrong start. put windows xp instead and you'll have a much more bearable experience overall. heck, might even call it snappy.

I really don't know what you can do with this laptop

Since I first watched this video, I was given a HP netbook by my friend; before I sold it on for them, I tested it to check performance. It was very similar to what I saw in this video, and why not? It had an Intel Atom N270 (check), 1GB of DDR2 (check) and the Intel GMA950 for graphics (check). So fundamentally the same machine, except that mine had a 160GB HDD instead of the 8GB SSD (8GB is useless for even a tablet or phone in 2018) and also ran Windows 7 Starter instead of the full blown Windows 7. Web browsing is exactly as what you describe under the Linux side of the ZG5, i.e. acceptable, but a little slow. KZfaq was awful, 360p max and then only for a little while. Streaming media (Spotify/Tunein) just about worked, as did playing a media file on Media Player. I didn't test gaming because I actually have a PS2 that I can use :) I fully agree with this review that netbooks in 2018 (and 2019) are done for - even a cheap tablet or phone will outperform this for web browsing and other basic tasks. Most phones and tablets are at least 720p now anyway, not 1024x600.

I have one of these that I honestly love. Not for performance, but it has a charm to the form factor/setup that's hard to explain.

Top tip: ditch the hdd, install puppy linux (slacko 6.3.2) on an sd card or usb and stick it in that thing. You'll be up and running in about 5 minutes, no setup needed everything works out of the box. Get an older version of ublock origin for the bundled firefox (ver.38) and this thing is completely fine for web browsing and youtube... I'm watching this video on a similar netbook as I type this (n280, 1gb ram).

My grandpa has one right now 😂

I'm still using a netbook every day :) It's my media center and network backup, attached to a 720p TV. It playes 720p films and youtube with smtube as well. Also Kodi does it's job really great. It can play 720p from the network (with cable). If it struggles, try to clean the computer and re-apply some thermal paste. It's a bit better performer, 64 bit Atom N455 CPU with Intel 3150 integrated graphics, also the ram is double, 2 gigs, running manjaro xfce edition. Crashplan creates the backup for other computer's important folders. Also it has an 1Tb HDD attached via USB, and duplicates the backups here if the internal hard drive dies. Got it really cheap in 2010 I guess, I used it as a school computer to take notes (and openTTD the crap out of it) after that he went to the back of the TV. I'm really happy with him, my next upgrade is a 4k TV, so a new media center will be required (i'll try to create something passive to reduce noise)... But this little device will serve well in the kid's room to display cartoons and movies :) Really good stuff with a wireless keyboard+mouse combo.

I still have my old laptop bought by my mom from 2006 or 2007. It's HP Compaq (forgot the laptop model) first 3 months, audio got broken along with Wi-Fi. Now, battery is dead, only able to use while it's plugged in, "A" on keyboard is missing, no upgrades, never opened for cleaning, running in windows 10 and surprisingly, Wi-Fi was fixed because of driver update. Working well and can run low spec games. So much memories with this baby. Will never throw it away or sell it.

back in 2011 i had to use a laptop that was worse than that. it had an intel celeron running at 900Mhz, windows me, 768MB of ram and s3 3d deaccelerator graphics.

Oh god, netbooks. Being a student when these were all the rage was fun. As far as gaming went they were only good for emulation of early 90s consoles.

Had this in primary school 6 years ago

I have a laptop from 2006, and I tought that was shit. Now I changed my mind

That ZG5 if I am not mistaken is the same hardware as Packard Bell Dot netbook. I got one with broken lid and I use it with an external 10" VGA monitor. I found the recovery disk from Packard Bell and I installed it on an old 160G HDD. It have XP home and the gaming is mostly like you describe it. The only upgrade was the memory to 1.5G. I played Gothic, Civilization 2, Diablo, Diablo 2. Now I installed Linux mint on it and I use it to stream music over wifi; I have two old network radios that are not useable anymore so I give them a chance to be useful.

I could see this being a good retro emulation machine. Throw something like Emu-OS on it, and you could have yourself a little gaming device that could play retro games and (maybe) some older titles.

If you could please do a comparison video between this and one of the newer Intel's atoms (like the ones in Windows tablets). I think it would make a cool video, comparing x86 compatible mobile CPUs from Intel.

My sister had this netbook years back and after I overclocked it a bit back to the actual values (since she already had it next to an outlet ready to charge anyway so higher TDP didn't matter) I was able to play games on PCSX2 at a steady 60 frames with hardly any tweaks needed, try it out, it's REALLY good if overclocked even a little!

I had this exact netbook - I bought in for my ex back in the day - it needed some tweaking and calibrating BUT - I installed few games on it and in ran very well actually - tried old NFS on it - one of the old classics ran above 25 fps at native res. Also ran Beyond Good & Evil and Lego Star Wars at native res too, but needed the 3d hack to emulate the features the hardware wasn't capable of. Man I have such nostalgia for this netbook - hated to see it go after the break up ; / maybe yours had less RAM than mine - I also used an SD card as additional ram on this thing. seriously best netbook of the time EVER

Intel open source driver on Linux can even outperform windows on OpenGL games, I really would have liked some benchmarks there.

I think that linux drivers for intel are much better than the windows. But is not a powerful graphic card.

kelpy g. a man of culture I see.

Dat Sega GT 2002 music got me crying. Great game AND you got that Kelpy G. Beautiful.

I just realised I have the same one as him Which I definetely don't use for Bonzi Buddy

*THIS LAPTOP EVEN BEAT THAT LITTLE POOP* IVE BORN IN 2008 and i got window7 acer

I still remember the old good days when I had Acer Aspire One. I used to play World of Warcraft on this thing with all lowest settings during Wrath of the Lich king. I was actually our guilds main tank. Raiding was like looking at slide show, barely getting 1 fps every 10 seconds (maybe that would count as 0.1fps?). Just mashing the buttons, hoping it would do something and see the fps go back to 11 after the boss was dead. Oh the good old days....

i want a netbook that has an actual CPU in it (not the atom APUs) but i cant seem to find one that was made this decade which has a removable battery they are all sealed these days which is completely useless and uncivilized

*but can it run roblox?*

i had that exact same model. i loved it, it ran ocarina of time. :D

Yes, those notebooks are not bad for older titles such as GTA III, CS 1.6, PES 6, Quake III and other games released before 2004. There's a list of hundreds of great games for notebooks that run good on the internet. The browsing experience is quite acceptable under the Maxthon browser and it actually plays YT videos quite smoothly wich was shocking to me, although sometimes there are some little stutters. Atom N270 notebook downgraded to Win 7 from Win 10 was the best thing i could do to this little beast (maybe XP could even be better idk)

Acer: Empowering People.....more like Enraging People I have the Aspire One D257, so I know how this goes, its horrible.

I doubt Sims 2 will be playable on that netbook lol..

I have a ZG5. I like it. I'm using it as a travel computer with Lubuntu. It runs some classic games and emulators and plays videos from the hard drive just fine. It's also good for work stuff like writing emails and chatting because it has a keyboard unlike tablets and smartphones. And it's tiny so it's really easy to bring along. It's not a gaming machine, and it's less capable of browsing the web than it was when it came out, but it's not entirely useless, to me at least. It's worth it to me just for the ability to transfer files between SD cards and USB sticks on the road.

Hey! That's almost same netbook my mother has! Though hers has 2 GB of RAM (the maximum amount). I can't believe she still uses it.

why didnt you install xp on it?

I want one!

I still use this shit today The desire to play and break is great

I still have my first laptop - an Acer AOD255 rocking an Atom N450 single core with hyperthreading. Used it so much. Actually installed 2 gigs of ram later on, gave it a new keyboard and a new display panel as well as a 9 cell battery. It served me very well. Back in those days, a single core atom with 1 gig of ram was able to run chrome and play youtube videos flawlessly.

you bought windows license for that?

Reinforced my opinion to avoid netbooks

this is giving me throwbacks to 2009 when I was in elementary school playing crappy flash games on my older sister's hp netbook and having the thing lock up every 20 minutes

Great soundtrack choice. 10/10 video

3 hours to install windows 7? Not bad considering my laptop took 3 hours just to download and install a 4gb win 10 update... it's not an old laptop or anything either, has an m.2 ssd, i7-7700HQ... I blame windows 10

0:41 text : 1024x600 *says: 1024x700*

My friend bought the same netbook when it first came out. It was kind of slow at the time as well but I found that if you want to push it, it's best to keep it plugged in and set the power management to high performance. On battery it doesn't do much more than office work.

I have nightmares about these acer netbooks, my brother had this exact model and I have a very vivid memory of my grandpa throwing it in the trash after the laptop froze in the middle of a youtube video, and then taking it back out like 4 hours later and it was still making that wretched noise

My worst gaming experience: smartphones! It started good, with many games going for 59p apiece (later increased to 69p, now 79p) but now most smartphone games don't cost anything to start playing yet as the game progresses, you get bullied into spending £1000+ on in-app purchases! On top of that, many of the older, better smartphone games can no longer be played due to newer versions of iOS not running them! They're conning you out of games you paid money for but cannot resell! Some, but FAR FROM ALL games, I have and will replace(d) by buying versions for REAL gaming handhelds; Let's Golf and Farm Frenzy I bought the PSP minis versions of, Airport Mania and Flight Control I bought the DSiWare versions of, Chu Chu Rocket and Speedball 2 I plan to buy the GBA versions of, Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing, Bookworm and Peggle I plan to get the DS versions of, Diner Dash and Blokus I plan to get the PSP versions of. Others, like X-Men Arcade and The Powerpuff Girls: Defenders of Townsville I may never be able to play again, unless there's an iOS emulator for Windows 10 that'll let me play them...

Can it play Minecraft?

I had an Acer Aspire One. I remember when my laptop died, I actually played World of Warcraft burning Crusade on that thing for a little while. I remember the laptop couldn't handle anything in outland, but the basic vanilla wow world could actually run on that decently with the specs turned all the way down.

Nvidia ION and ION 2 were pretty cool at the time, and were the solution for Atom gaming. Atom wasn't as horrible as it really seems, but manufacturers combined the cheapest and mediocre components on the market with the Atom, and this pushed its reputation down. AMD also had a competitor with atom (I think it was the C series, but they all had a radeon gpu) the nvidia ion solution that I used on an HP Mini, was basically a geforce 9400M, it wasn't good at running GTA IV well, but it ran as most of the games I wanted intended, in addition to being a big hype at the time, due to the fact that you were running a demanding game on something so small (just as it is a hype now in 2024, smartphones are running Fallout 4 through winlator). For testing purposes, I searched the entire internet and found an nvidia ion FOR DESKTOP, yes, they existed and were rare. It was a Zotac ion PCI-Express 1x. Paired with Pentium D955 and then with core2duo E8400, I could see that gaming performance on Intel Atom was not an abyss, Atom was handling the load well.

PC Master Race wins again!

that is not a 5 years old netbook its a 15 years old netbook

I have this exact netbook that I've refurbished recently, with an SSD, a 1GB RAM upgrade, a cooling system overhaul, and a new battery. Windows XP 32-bit. It runs Battle Engine Aquila at almost playable framerates at the lowest settings, and of course older games like Rollercoaster Tycoon 2, Zoo Tycoon, and OG Fallout. And it plays video on VLC just fine. I think the main problem is the HDD they come with, I recommend replacing that with an SSD.

I've got an Aspire One 722 - one of the AMD C-50 models with the HD display and Synaptics trackpad. It's honestly pretty great for what it is, battery life is a solid 5 hours on OpenSUSE, it handles 480p video/web browsing just fine, and I can stream Netflix/Prime Video with no issues whatsoever. It even has an HDMI port, which is handy for connecting it to the TV and playing back video there. Even the display isn't so bad, 1366x768 actually feels somewhat appropriate for this size, viewing angles are within acceptable range and color reproduction isn't offensively bad like on so many netbooks.

Still better than my laptop

One of ur computer screens is not the right way round

Glad to see you making high quality videos so fast.

Wish they still made Netbooks, a technicians dream machine. Powerful enough to run basic things like putty yet small and light. Plus Ethernet port and full sized SD card slot. Handy.

“Plus, it has a 8gb ssd, that’s not bad” *Bruh*

)

I'm pretty sure I have one of these that is even older and I was able to use it as a studying laptop after installing Chromium OS (open source version of the OS in Chromebooks). The display is really the thing that brings it down massively. It's not that bad if you go into it knowing that 95% of everything you want to do will not work.

Netbooks are actually decently capable if you know what to look for. The Dell Latitude 2120 netbook I‘ve got has the standard 10.1 inch 1024 x 600 resolution screen but it does have a N550 atom processor. Most netbooks are running single cores or hyper-threaded single cores at best. The N550 is a hyper-threaded dual core running at 1.5 ghz. 4 threads running at 1.5 gigs isn’t to bad for a netbook. Not to mention it’s got 2 gigs of 1600mhz DDR3 ram which is the most it can take but with a 128 gig Samsung SSD in it it’s actually surprisingly decent for a netbook. Mind you this is running a 32 bit version of windows 7 ultimate. Put windows 7 starter or XP on it and it’d run even faster. It CAN game if you have realistic expectations. Railroad tycoon 1 and 2 as well as roller coaster tycoon 1 and 2 run flawlessly. Doom (the original) runs perfectly and if run threw a source port like Zdoom which gives you mouse look and other modernized enhancements it’ll run pegged at 60 fps. The original Driver game runs great on it as well. These games are running at max detail at the netbooks native max resolution. Other games no doubt would work too. So again if you know what to look for and have realistic expectations netbooks actually are decent. Put Chrome on it like I did and you can browse the web too even watching 720P video on KZfaq. Granted there’s no point in going higher since it only has a 600P screen and higher resolutions would simply bog the CPU down for no gain. But again it’s not a bad machine. Just look for one of the later netbooks that has better hardware like the N550 processor, DDR3 ram, a SATA drive instead of a IDE drive, ext....

My shitty phone is stronger than this

I play on my 13 year old windows XP on my channel

I have a Dell Xps L702X out 2011 and it’s still fast for it’s age. And i only Upgraded the Drive from an HDD to SSD.

Kudos for the Sega GT 2002 music!

I have one of these. Exact model too. I've been looking for another one, as they are good for old games like RVGL. And doing online in games as such.

Great vid! Maybe I'm the only one in the world but I loved my netbook. It was an aspire one 722 (I believe). Used it for work...browsing the web at home...just basic things. Gaming yeah..no way, but just simple stuff it worked great with. Considering it was around $100 at the time, it was great. Even had the extended battery and got close to 6 hours out of it.

That smooth jazz in the background tho

I loved EEE Nettops with xubuntu. Perfect match.

Oh god. I had one of these little fuckers back then. I had to suffer with it for 3 years. When I finally got a Dell Inspiron, I celebrated it by putting the Aspire under my F150 truck, and running over it. The crunching sound was so satisfying.

One come up at my house and no one claim it(because its was so good), after checking it and see why no one wanted I found a good use for it as a BF1942 server, this was great at it!

Netbooks have evolved a lot. On the last gen Atom Z3735 Fable ran at 30 FPS at 720p with medium to high settings and I got Borderlands 1 to run at 40-60 at 640x400 with max settings without shadows... which looks good on a 8inch screen.

I had the exact same one back in 2013. The BIOS got corrupted 10 times,so I had to reflash it,then the HDD died,so I shoved a SSD in there,making it even worse,and it was SLOOOOOOOWWWWW

I used my old netbook just to run PowerPoint in the church where I played guitar, I had PowerPoint slides displaying the words of the hymns to the congregation on big screens the church had so as people could sing along. That's all it was good for.

Have same model of that netbook, but with 160Gb HDD. Using for game from 90s and old visual novels and that working fine

>5 year old netbook >Surely it can't be THAT bad >Sees video date >6 years ago Netbooks have gotten a lot better since, albeit also at a higher price. The last atoms can even do some older AAA titles.

I remember seeing people using these ("netbooks" in general) and thinking what a waste of time they were back in like...2008-2009. I got to use one and...I loaded a YT video only for it to stutter and crash...three times in a row. My friend had just gotten it for like $250 and she HATED it. When I saw their performance I realized that no amount of portability made them useful. I saw people taking notes with them in college and all I could think to myself was how much I'd rather hand write all of my notes then transcribe them on my desktop (which was a decent gaming PC for the time...running an 8800 GTS 640 and Core 2 Duo Conroe).

I used to own one of those with similar specs except from Asus (EeePC) and it has 160gb harddisk instead, the rest is practically the same. You will need to overclock the Atom and use a program I believe it's called something like 'swift shader', which basically skips some of the shaders in games. With that I can run a few games like Sonic Riders and Devil May Cry 3 'at almost full speed', which was totally unplayable without. Counter Strike 1.6 runs okay too. It didn't felt so bad when I used it in that time (2010). Honestly even now I want one simply for the form factor, just to SSH and play around with Linux on. I wish more companies release Netbooks nowadays, especially if they can make it even thinner/smaller.

From your quality I thought you have at least 200k subs, but NOPE. Such underrated channel

That Aspire one in the video is from around 2008/2009ish, I had one as well. It can't even run Half life 2 or Doom 3 playable because the integrated graphics don't have hardware accelerated T&L or Vertex Shaders. The driver had to do this via software on the CPU, and considering how slow the old singlecore Atom CPU was it just ended up in a slideshow. The only games that ran well on those were games that were made until around 2000ish like Half Life 1, CS 1.6, Quake 3 etc.. Good thing some newer netbooks had an Nvidia ION chip with a GeForce 9400M GPU which speeded up a lot of games, but CPU limited games or emulators were still slow.

i used to have an Asus n10j netbook. It had a dedicated 256mb GPU. I used to play Call of Duty 4 on it, multiplayer. Ran at 35-40 FPS with a slight OC, minimum, and at 800x600. I even managed to play TF2 on it on servers with less than 14 people. barely dropped below 30FPS with a custom lower than low graphics ini, also at 800x600. Bloody loved that thing.

I didn't even no that tiny Windows 7 was a thing. I'm gonna check that out right now!