Real-life performance impressions
Right out of the box, the Aspire One 751's performance is atrocious. In deals with separate devils, Acer has agreed to ship the McAfee security suite on its Aspire-branded system and the Norton counterpart on the Gateway-branded one. Combine that with Windows Vista Home Basic SP1, pile on more bloatware than a big-&-tall men's store, and the 751 crawls. Here's a look at the out-of-the-box software payload on the system:

You may have thought you were getting a little laptop, but you were really getting a software delivery vehicle.

After poking around some, one of my first moves with the 751 was to remove the McAfee suite, along with Google Desktop and a few other pre-installed programs for which I had no use. I then installed Vista SP2 and all of the patches available via Windows Update, plus Firefox 3.5. With those tweaks, the Aspire One 751 became much more usable, if not entirely satisfactory. After using it a day or two in this configuration, I decided to install the Windows 7 RC and see whether it helped any.

If anything, Win7 proved to be a little quicker on the 751, but the difference between it and Vista SP2 wasn't massive. The same basic performance issues remained. Sometimes, the 751 feels snappy and competent, just like most decent Atom-based netbooks, when installing programs, poking around in control panels, or surfing the web. At other times, though, it simply seems to choke. Pulling up a control panel dialog can take five to ten seconds, for instance—an eternity on a modern PC. Load up a web page with a too-intensive Flash payload, and page rendering and scrolling grow sluggish. Pages with embedded Flash videos like Failblog.org can bring the 751 grinding to a halt. In a worst-case scenario—which happens way too often—the system will become unresponsive to user input. All you can do is click the button to close the browser tab and wait. After a few seconds, the system will close the tab and free itself, generally.

You're getting the picture, I hope. The 751's performance can be acceptable at times, but it's not quite up to the task of being a full-featured, full-speed web client. Whether the blame should rest at the feet of its lightweight hardware or Adobe's heavyweight Flash software, I'm not sure. The end result is the same—not that Flash is the only culprit. Software installers can produce similar slowdowns.

Some folks have attributed the 751's performance issues to its Atom Z520 processor, and I'm sure that plays a role. However, my Eee PC 1000H caps its CPU clock at 800MHz on battery power and still feels faster than the 751. Heck, the 1000H never really chokes like the 751. I think the slowdowns are a total system effort, with the puny GMA 500 graphics, low memory bandwidth, slow processor, and SATA/NCQ-less chipset all contributing to the cause. The truth is that the 751's internals are intended for a hand-held MID, not a netbook. You can feel the difference.

Those performance limitations are apparent into other scenarios, too.

Although the 751's integrated graphics will run the Windows Aero look, screen redraws are slow, and Aero doesn't coexist well with HD video decode acceleration. These problems are punctuated by the occasional blue screen of death when using the latest GMA 500 drivers from Intel's website—although, admittedly, I am using a pre-release OS.

Games are a dicey proposition on the 751, as well. The system ran Battlefield Heroes without crashing, but my notes say it was "too slow for words." When I tried to run Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One, I was greeted with an OpenGL error message telling me there was "no compatible display device." I'm sure Tycho would unleash a compact, devastating witticism over that. (Although judging by that game title, perhaps I overestimate his capacity for conciseness.) Frame rates in Geometry Wars were too low at the display's native resolution. The game was playable at 640x480, although navigating menus felt laborious. Even World of Goo taxed the 751; playing at the native res is no good, and low resolutions aren't especially fluid, either.

The Gateway LT3103 comes with a little less bloatware, but I took a similar path to tweaking it, removing the Norton security suite and eventually installing the Win7 RC, along with the newest Radeon X1200-series drivers available via Windows Update. All along the way, the LT3103 felt relatively quick and competent, faster than not only the Aspire One 751 but also my Eee PC 1000H. So the LT3103 is more than competent for basic web use, editing documents, and the like, as a netbook ought to be. The Aero theme runs perfectly on the Gateway, too, with fluid window animations and transparency effects. I don't want to overstate things because, as we saw in the results on the last page, the LT3103 isn't always faster than an Atom-based system or the Nano-based Samsung NC20. But subjectively speaking, the LT3103 has to be the overall most capable netbook I've used.

Still, that Radeon X1270 IGP won't buy you a ticket to gaming bliss. Even when I dropped down to 800x480 resolution with super-low-quality audiovisual settings, Battlefield Heroes chugged along at 10-15 FPS, unplayable. Precipice was no better, with frame rates at 10-15 FPS and constant audio static. Happily, Geometry Wars played perfectly at 1366x768, though, and World of Goo was smooth as butter at the same resolution. All of which means you're probably confined to casual, non-3D games or older games with very simple 3D graphics—perhaps an early Barbie: Deer Hunter title or something.