Alien: Isolation

I feel the hypocrite for playing Alien: Isolation. Not only did I recently announce publicly that I was done paying $60.00 for new games, I specifically stated that Alien: Isolation was definitely not a game worth spending that much money. Yet here I am, just a week later having broken both vows.

To be fair, it is an Aliens game; though individual titles of the series have been of mixed quality, at heart it is a very appealing franchise. So it was never a question of whether or not I would acquire the game, only of when and for how much. Anyway, even if it was a stinker I knew I would buy it eventually; I mean, I've played Aliens: Colonial Marines  multiple times so it's not as if quality were the deciding factor in my purchases. Anyway, I blame the Internet for my backsliding. Not only was it being loudly praised by all but they also had the gall to post videos of their gameplay online. And if those videos made any one thing clear, it was that graphically this game was outstanding.

Okay, I admit it; I'm a little bit of a graphics whore too. A game based on the Aliens franchise and drop-dead gorgeous? Goodbye $60.00!

So, seeing as the visuals were one of the main criteria to my purchase, what's the verdict? Is the game really as beautiful as the trailers, screenshots and Let's Play videos suggest? In a word, yes. It is not just the awesome lighting and textures, though those send a clear announcement as to the arrival of "next-gen" graphics than any press-release from Microsoft or Sony. There's still room for improvement (my test is always whether or not I can clearly read the memo and sign textures on the walls; I can in Alien:Isolation but it's still blurry) but it's nice to play a game that isn't stuck in a 256MB texture budget. But more than that it is the overall artistry of the graphics; I don't think there was ever a moment in my play-through that I thought "that doesn't look right". The levels are chock-full of details, with all sorts of gadgets and clutter occupying even the most isolated corner; I'm pretty sure there are more polygons used in a single hallway in Isolation than a whole level of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Clever uses of light, smoke and depth-of-field also give the game a very realistic-looking effect. It is very reminiscent of the movies, especially when the lights start flashing and steam bursts out of nearby pipes.

The animations and character models aren't quite up to the high standards set by the level design; they aren't in anyway bad but we've seen better in other games. The best of the bunch are the intentionally uncanny-valley androids; a more primitive model than that seen in the movies, their slightly stilted movements and rubbery skin mesh well with the less-than-stellar animations of the game. Anyway, in Alien: Isolation, the goal of the game is usually to avoid the NPCs and monsters as much as possible, so the flaws are less noticeable anyway.

The levels are also very accurate in movies' aesthetics, from its pixelated introduction to its padded walls, and fans of the franchise will find much to appreciate; I know the fanboy in me went "Squeeee!" in delight at every reference I found. Having said that, the game often plays it too close to film, and I would have appreciated not only a little novelty but also some variety; the engineering section looks remarkably like the mall which looks pretty identical to the hospital which isn't that much different in appearance to the communications tower. How about a romp through the hydroponics section or some faux-wood paneling in the fancy executive suites? But no, it was all raw industrial-grunge-sheik; all amazingly well rendered, sure, but very samey in the end.

Some praise should be given to the sound design; although the voice-acting is merely par for the course (and that of the original actors decidedly sub-par) the Foley effects are very well done. The clattering of the ancient computers and other effects are true to the movies, and the thumping of the alien as it clambers through the vents are terrifically spooky. The music highlights exciting moments, but was just a little too subdued for my taste; the game is already very quiet and a bit more background sound would have been welcome.

The controls are workable for the most part, although a bit stiff in a few specific areas. The tool selection is a bit too cumbersome for its own good (I'll say more on that later) and my character moved a bit too much like a tank; getting her to run - at least on the gamepad - was less smooth than it could have been. Elsewhere, especially with the hacking mini-games, the controls are a touch too twitchy. I'm sure this is all intentional to some degree - it helps to enhance the feeling of vulnerability - but it often came off more as annoying.

Much hype has been made about how this game is a interquel between the original Alien movie and the Aliens sequel, and how this game owes more of its tone and pacing to the former rather than the latter. I took the role of Amanda Ripley, daughter of the heroine of the movies as she scrambled through the semi-derelict space station Sevastapol in search of evidence of her mother's passing. The game does indeed capture the slower measured timing and drama of the haunted-house-in-space feel of the original. It also, unfortunately, has the same flat and rather uninteresting characters but - again - since I spent so much of the game is spent on my own this wasn't that big of a problem. Worse is the actually story itself, which simply has too many climaxes; there were at least a half-dozen suitable places to end the story long before the rather sudden and unfulfilling actual ending. Then again, who really plays these games (or watches the movies) for the story?

No, it's all about the gameplay and this is paradoxically both Isolation's greatest strength and biggest flaw, and once again it revolves all around the pacing of the adventure. If taken moment-by-moment, the game is intense, exciting and memorable. This is unequivocally a stealth-game, more so even than any of the Thief series. The main character is weak and powerless and in any confrontation with the monsters she is at best going to come out beaten and bloody; far more likely she will end up dead, and quite suddenly too. Even late in the game, when she is armed with flamethrowers, shotguns, and grenades, battle is better avoided even against the weakest of enemies (and against the eponymous alien, there is no question: if it catches you, you are dead).

The game very expertly reminded me of how ineffective my character was in combat and guided me to use the stealth option whenever I could. Stumbling through a dark hospital with only the sounds of the monster crawling in the vents above can be terrifying; I was well aware that the beast - guided only by its unpredictable AI - could appear at any moment and toss me back to my last save-point. As I crept past flickering lights and open doors, I always kept an eye open for the nearest hiding spot, be it a comforting locker, vent or even some boxes to duck behind: anything to keep me from being seen. I always had the option of running if push-came-to-shove, but that just generated more noise and anyway, I knew there was no way to outrun the alien. No, it was creep-or-die, and so I pretty much crept everywhere.

Save-points are fairly liberally placed, although I regretted each death because every inch of progress was hard-fought for. Having to go back and re-do the same sequence was heartbreaking, not so much because I was covering the same ground but because even just sneaking across a room can require several minutes of adrenalin-filled, heart-pounding tension. Anyway, the semi-random nature of the AI means that encounters rarely happen the same way twice; death is sudden but rarely repetitive.

This all sound great on paper, but where the game fails is in the overall rhythm of its gameplay. Although it may be hard to imagine during the first hour or so of gameplay (during which the alien is notably absent except for a few brief glimpses), once it does appear the eponymous monster is just too frequent an opponent. It was  constantly haunting me, which not only robs the beast somewhat of its terrifying aspect, but turns those heart-clenching encounters into almost tedious chores. I would escape the creature only to enter an entirely different section of the station to find it there ahead of me. "Didn't I just leave this party?" I would quip, but in my head I'm already looking at my watch and wondering how long it will take to get past this obstacle. It becames even worse in the late game when (SPOILERS!) I started to face off against multiple drones and face-huggers. Each encounter remained as intense as ever, but it changed from being a fun, self-inflicted horror to a sort of hyper-focused, migraine-inducing work. The best way to play, I found, was in short bursts - twenty or thirty minutes at a time - but that came at a cost to the game's overall atmosphere. Worse - I mentioned this bit before - the game also doesn't know when to end, so each success just required me to go on another quest into the bowels of the station, often revisiting areas already cleared. The further the game progressed, the more effort it required to continue and the less reward I was getting out of it.

Alien: Isolation also featured the requisite crafting system that is now apparently mandatory for every game (on the plus side, there is a happy absence of any skill-leveling system). This is particularly unexciting addition but does provide impetus for risky exploration of the levels. Alas, the reward for this are a handful of tools of the likes of noisemakers and flares. In all honesty, these tools were amazingly useful in keeping me alive, but my use of them was hampered by the controls; often by the time I had readied one of the gadgets, the opportunity to use it come and gone. Even when I did have the right tool at hand, the controls to throw or place the gadget were finicky and far less responsive than they could have been. This made the game more difficult, I think, than the developers intended but - based on my watching others people's play-throughs - I'm not the only one with this problem.  New tools discovered later in the game also unlock previously blocked sections of areas visited earlier, making the game somewhat like Castlevania; myself, I just saw it as an excuse to make me retread territory I had already explored.

So in the end, Alien: Isolation was a very mixed bag. As far as its production values go, it is a stupendous achievement, and fans of the franchise will really appreciate all the homages to the movies. Its gameplay is undeniably exciting at times and any one individual encounter exceeds all the hype you may have heard. The problem is that the overall design just does not hold up over multiple hours of gameplay, with poor pacing and an unexciting story. 

I am sure that some gamers (die-hard fans of the movie series and people who love the particular genre of survival horror where you are powerless and hunted)  will think this one of video gaming's greatest achievements, but for the general audience it is hard to recommend this title. It is a far better experience to watch than actually play. Frankly, if you are really interested I can't help but suggest you save your $60 and load up a Let's Play of the game on YouTube and maybe just rent the damn thing for a weekend if you are a graphics-whore (like myself) and need to see the textures close up for a bit. If you like what you see, then wait for the game to inevitably hit the bargain bin. I think it's a game worth checking out - at least for a while - but not worth the investment of full-price or a thorough play-through.

Completely Arbitrary Numerical Score (CANS): 2.2178655523678211956757239 (out of something)

Sure, it's better than most games but wait until its on sale.

Taming Windows 8.1 (Part 1)

As you may have gathered from an earlier post, I recently acquired a new laptop that came with Windows 8.1 preinstalled. While generally satisfied with the hardware, one downside was that hardware drivers were difficult to find for anything except Windows 8.1. In other words, if I wanted to use this computer to its full potential, I would have to stick with Microsoft's latest opus.

Windows 8.1 "Modern" Interface

This wasn't my first encounter with Windows 8, of course. I had run the beta for several months prior to its release, and even had a copy of the retail version that came with another computer (fortunately, I had an extra Windows 7 license and the hardware was fully compatible so I didn't have to use it!). Like many, I found Windows 8 uncomfortable to use, largely because of how radically - and poorly - Microsoft had revamped the interface. Nearly twenty years of graphic user interface evolution was flushed down the toilet in order to that Microsoft could present a common interface between PCs, tablet computers, Windows Phones and its XBox game console. The results of trying to mesh the needs of so many varied platforms with one single interface was as disastrous as might be expected. While there have been a few professed fans, by and large the change was met with anger and may have been part of the reason PC sales have plummeted so precipitously in recent years.

None of this was unknown to me, of course; I read the news, I had experienced Windows 8 for myself. I knew what I was getting into. Fortunately, I also knew that - thanks to enterprising developers - a lot of the horrors of the so-called Modern interface could be disappeared with the additions of a handful of software tools. If I had to use Windows 8.1, then I would do so in a way that minimized its worst parts.

This is that story.

First to be installed was Classic Shell. This project is a free, open-source application that can be used to completely banish the horrid Modern Start Screen, allowing the user to boot to a desktop that to all intents and purposes looks like Windows XP or Windows 7. There remain a few areas  -for instance, the screen where you select your wireless network - where a few remnants of the Modern interface remain, but these are not too bothersome.  Installation of Classic Shell is exceptionally easy. Once it is installed, however, you have numerous options you can tweak to your heart's delight.

Classic Shell Start Button Config

The first thing that needed a bit of adjustment was the Start Menu. Although Windows 8.1 had returned the Start button to the desktop, clicking it merely took you back to the dreaded Modern Start Screen. ClassicShell returned the original functionality back to the button, but some of the default stylistic choices were not to my taste. Fortunately, like many open source programs, users are given lots of choice on how to change things. Right clicking on the Start Menu popped up a little context menu; selecting "Settings" allowed me to to get into the guts of the program.

I decided to go with the Windows 7 style menu; you can also choose the "classic" single-column start menu introduced in Windows95, or the two-column menu of Windows XP. However, since many of my other PCs are running Windows 7, I felt it better to have a unified, consistent interface across all the computers. First thing I had to do, though, was replace the default non-trademark infringing Start button that ships with Classic Start; a quick Google search found me a working replacement. I chose the custom option and pointed the program to the downloaded image file (I later learned that this file is not cached anywhere, so if you later delete it the program reverts to the default).

Classic Shell Start Menu Options

With the button sorted out, now it was time work on the actual Start menu. Classic Shell again offers a host of options which allow you to mix and match features from XP, Vista and Windows 7. I like a nice and clean Start Menu, with a minimum of links. After over two decades of using Windows, I know all the keyboard shortcuts anyway. I enabled Computer, Recent Items, Control Panel, Devices and Printers and Run, and told ClassicShell to hide the rest. A nice feature of the program is that you can actually change the order in which these items appear on the menu; even Microsoft's shell never offered that functionality!

Classic Start Main Menu Options

Finally, I needed to clean up the Programs folder. Most important to me, was hiding as much of  Windows 8 - including all references to the Apps and Store - that I could. Fortunately this just required a few button clicks, specifically unchecking "Show Metro Apps", checking "Hide App Shortcuts" and unchecking "Show Recent Metro Apps" in the "Main Menu" section of the program.


With the Start menu taken care of, I was halfway there. Already Windows 8.1 was looking like a useable desktop instead of the abominable bastard-child of a tablet and an XBox. But the job's not done yet.

Windows 8.1 with Classic Start installed

Tragedy of the Commons - or How Not To Redesign A Social Website

Although its heyday may be years behind it, Slashdot remains a favored place for geeks and techies to congregate, there to discuss the latest news, gadgets and software. It is a site where traffic is not driven by the articles half-heartedly posted by the often-absentee editors, but by the conversation those articles generate. It is in fact a running joke that nobody actually reads the articles and instead they all just jump into the discussion to offer their two cents. But - thanks largely to its robust moderation system, controlled not by the site's administrators but by the audience themselves - the discussions on Slashdot are remarkably on-topic, intelligent, humorous and free of spam or flames.

Slashdot was founded in 1997 by Robert Malda, under the name Chips and Dips and remained under his curation until 2011, when it was sold to Dice Holdings, along with a number of other Geeknet websites including SourceForge. Dice Holdings started as a high-tech recruitment site and that remains the core of their business; they most recently acquired recruiting startup getTalent. Long-time readers of Slashdot worried what their purchase of Slashdot might mean for "their" site. However, over the first couple of years it appeared that their worries were moot, as the changes - largely the addition of a "Business Intelligence" section and the rarely-visited SlashdotTV video - seemed to indicate that Dice would remain fairly hands off of the website. In fact, there was occasional grumbling about how disinterested Dice appeared in maintaining certain editorial standards, especially when obvious marketing pieces or poorly-proofread articles slipped into the newsfeed.

That is, until February 7, 2014, when the controversial "beta" redesign started to be pushed onto existing members. The actual design has been unveiled in October the previous year but had been running on a side server and few users visited it except to provide feedback on what they thought was wrong with the new look. The February switch-over actively began redirecting users to the "beta" design.

The new redesign featured a front page filled with large images, a floating header, glaring whitespace and - most tellingly - a simplified comment system and a design that reduced the prominence of those comments. The site's look was changed from a relatively information-dense and text-heavy website to something more akin to a image-heavy blog.

Slashdot "Classic" - The Original Design

Slashdot Beta - The Redesign

To say the readership found this change unwelcome would be a gross understatement. Thousands of comments poured in expressing their distaste for the new look. Entire discussions were purposely disrupted, intent on making clear their anger to the Slashdot administrators and their bosses at Dice. Some comments were thoughtful, wondering as to the meaning of the change and what alternatives the readers had open to them. Other were as spiteful as would be expected on any angry message board.

Of course, Dice would not be the first to face such anger; most community boards suffer through similar growing pains and upset when they try to update their appearance. And certainly Dice had reason to want a change; while the rest of the web had embraced "Web 2.0", Slashdot had purposely remained old-school, favoring content over chrome.  Robert Malda, the previous owner of Slashdot wrote on the redesign: "Pretty much every Slashdot change, big or small, as been met with some level of community objection," he said in an e-mail. "When I originally added (totally optional!) user accounts in 1998, the community freaked out that I was asking them to even consider logging in!" What made the response to the Slashdot beta so extra-ordinary was the unanimity of the opposition; not one voice spoke up in favor of the new look, and it was four days before the first commentators started to say "enough" to the most vocal of the objectors, not in defense of Dice's decision but out of a desire to just get back to business.

Dice's response - after nearly 48 hours of silence after the explosion - was less than encouraging. Although promising to take user feedback into consideration, they also remained adamant that the new look was here to stay, and even the option to switch back to the "classic" interface would eventually be removed. This delay in responding smacked many of corporate politics, and few believed the promises that their feedback would be honored; after all, the initial design had been lambasted by the userbase for months since its unveiling in October 2013 and yet it had still been pushed, relatively unchanged, onto users months later. How, Slashdot regulars wondered, was this listening to the users?

Of concern to many was Dice's intention with their revered site. Were they, as Dice claimed, merely updating the look merely to "grow the audience" and attract new users? Or was Dice, as many suspected, attempting to reposition Slashdot from a techie-oriented social site to a more traditional news provider oriented towards the needs of CIOs and tech-business? Many of the changes of the past few years seemed in line with this theory, and the new design shared similarities with other business-oriented websites. Perhaps most damning in the eyes of the objectors was an except from Dice's own 2013 financial report:

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

Whatever the reasoning behind the redesign, the objectors felt betrayed. Although the site was run by Dice, many users felt a sort of communal ownership; after all, it was their comments which were the primary draw for the site; it was their discussion which attracted new traffic, and it was the users who - through their comments and moderation - molded the spirit and mood of Slashdot. In fact, Slashdot allows the users to retain full ownership of all their comments. Dice's actions were seen as unilateral and lacking in respect for that spirit and the community that built it.

This may have been unintentional. Web designer Joe Peacock discussed in a Notacon seminar  his own disastrous attempt to change the look of Fark.com, a competing social site, in 2011. He states that such problems may stem from a lack of understanding of the difference between social and corporate websites by the designer."On a corporate website, it is their  [the owner's] site. You go to the site and they push information down to you. On a social site, it's my site."  Web-designers used to building a web-presence for corporate entities often have a certain hubris that blinds them to this difference. "We thought we knew better what to do with the site than the users did," Peacock warns. "We didn't give the users time to acclimate. Don't shock the user." He instead advised pushing out changes incrementally, and engaging the community in the changes. By allowing them an opportunity to voice their objections or to help chose a direction, the web site owner can mitigate much of the outrage. In fact, more often than not by providing this option most users find they actually do not much care about the proposed changes; they just appreciate the opportunity to share in the development. Fark.com, which remains independently owned, wisely backed away from the 2011 redesign and worked with their audience to come to an agreeable middle-ground - in part by allowing them to vote on proposed mock-ups - and has rebounded from the debacle.

This is unfortunately one lesson that Dice did not take to heel. Although they did present the beta redesign months earlier, they ignored the feedback from the community. They did engage the users by allowing them to discuss different designs. They forced the changes on the users in its entirety rather than trickle them in gradually. Dice followed up these blunders with a response that struck many as nothing more than a blow-off by a corporate entity that neither respected nor valued the users who were both the audience and the primary content providers.

The fate of Slashdot.com remains uncertain. Already many users have indicated their intent to leave the website, either to join other already-existing communities - such as the venerable Ars Technica - or to create a simulacrum of Slashdot not under the control of Dice's corporate thumb. Already one such attempt is in early planning stage: SoylentNews.org, largely using the same underlying code that drives Slashdot. Others seek pleasanter - and freer - pastures on Usenet, reoccupying the comp.misc newsgroup. A week-long boycott of Slashdot.com is also intended.

Ultimately however, the short-term effect to the website will likely be fairly mild. Most users will likely migrate back to the social site again and the outrage will fade, especially as the classic design still remains accessible for the moment. However, in the longer term Dice may have sealed the fate of their website, having forced their users to reconsider the relationship between Dice, Slashdot, and themselves. The users have been reminded of their alternatives and the community will likely diminish at a faster rate. Engagement amongst those that stay will drop.  Dice hopes that its redesign will attract a new audience, making the loss of this old guard may be insignificant, but many of the current users believe that the new Slashdot has too little to viably compete against the many other similar sites and without the users to provide the intelligent commentary even the existing audience will have little reason to hang around,  at which point the website will probably be shuttered, ending a nearly twenty-year presence on the Internet. If this happens, all that will remain will be fond memories and a lamentable lesson likely to be ignored by the next round of Internet entreponeurs who only see the social community as an obstacle and not a valued partnership.

Acer Aspire v5-122p Ultra-Thin Touchscreen Notebook

Acer Aspire v5-122p-0825 
Ultra-Thin Touchscreen Notebook

Specs:

CPU: AMD A4-1250 Dual Core @ 1GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 8210
RAM: 4 GB DDR3 Low Voltage (2GB on board + 2 GB SODIMM)
HDD: Western Digital 500GB 5400rpm SATA3
LCD: 11.6" Glossy Widescreen Multitouch LCD
Audio: RealTek HD
Network: Qualcomm Atheros AR95x 802.11 b/g/n + BlueTooth
Peripherals: 83-key non-backlit keyboard, touchpad, 2x USB (1xUSB3, 1xUSB2),  CrystalEye webcam, SD/MicroSD Card-reader
Battery: 3-cell Lithium Ion

Although I own a bevy of tablet- and laptop computers, when I expect to work away from home, I tend to bring my trusty netbook along for the ride. Tablets are wonderful media-consumption devices, but absolutely terrible if you want to do any real work, and laptops just can't compare with the portability and battery life of a a net- or ultra-book. Unfortunately, my 5-year old Dell Inspiron Mini10T - with its limited 1GB RAM and 1GHz Atom processor - was proving incapable of handing the demands of modern operating systems and applications. Don't get me wrong; I loved my little Dell but after waiting five minutes for it to boot MS Windows 7 and load up a single document, I realized it was time for an upgrade.

Netbooks are becoming a rare breed these days, with their niche largely taken over by tablets. What few exist tend to be either underpowered and cheap, or rival laptops in both performance and price, but very little between the two extremes. But - having desktop powerhouses at home - I was more concerned with price than performance and ultimately settled for the Acer Aspire v5-122p.

My demands were simple: I wanted a machine that I could carry around everywhere, and one that would let me get to work almost as soon as I opened it up. A slightly larger screen would be welcome too. Raw power and battery life were secondary concerns.

The Aspire v5 is no powerhouse; my gaming PC is roughly 20 times in every category of the 3DMark benchmark. When it comes to modern games, it is a complete failure; some won't even start and for those that do, the frame-rates are in the single-digits. But it shines for those ordinary, mundane tasks: word-processing, email, surfing the web.

Most impressively is its boot-time, although that might have as much to do with Windows 8.1. Still,

going from pressing the power button to the desktop in less than 30 seconds without an SSD is still an impressive feat. Applications open fairly swiftly as well (9 seconds for LibreOffice, 8 seconds for Firefox*, 7 for Thunderbird). The interface remains snappy throughout, thanks to the dual cores and Windows 8's improved threading. The Aspire v5's performance is in no way jaw-dropping - compared to other PCs, it's average at best, if not a bit pokey - but it is still fast enough that you end up grinding your teeth waiting for it to chug through basic tasks.

The rest of the hardware is fairly mundane. The 500GB hard-drive is spacious enough to hold most of the data you will need "on the go". The Radeon 8210 HD is adequate for apps and playing video (it even handles BluRay-quality movies with aplomb). Audio is handled by RealTek HD integrated audio; the speakers - located on the bottom of the chassis - are surprisingly loud and clear although, due to the size of the netbook - channel separation is difficult to make out. The CrystalEye webcam is nominally HD but - while functional - still outputs grainy, low-res video. The glossy widescreen LCD is a bit dim; adequate for indoor work but difficult to use outside in the sun. It features 10-point multi-touch capabilities though, should you have any desire to smear up your display pointlessly. On the other hand, it has a fairly wide viewing angle so I wasn't constantly struggling to keep my head perfectly centered lest the image appear washed out.

The entire computer weighs in at a barely noticeable 3.3 pounds. Made of thin plastic, the chassis does feel a bit frail, and I worry it might not stand up to excessive wear. It features a 3-cell Lithium Ion battery with a 3-hour life. The battery is non-removable, although it can be extended with the addition of an optional second battery ($99). The case features only a minimum of ports: two USB  ports, a slot for an SD/MicroSD card-reader, a headphone jack and a port for a proprietary expansion dongle. The dongle that comes with the laptop only has a VGA port, but a more robust dongle adds an additional USB port and an Ethernet jack ($35). I do sort of miss having an integrated Ethernet jack since I like to use my netbooks to troubleshoot routers - which is best done when wired - but I can understand why it was dropped from newer machines. Anyway, the dongle does allow me to have the best of both worlds, even if it is a bit of a kludge.

The power button is somewhat inconveniently located on the side of the computer. The widely-spaced 83-key keyboard is somewhat reminiscent of the chiclet keyboards of years past, but is surprisingly useable (still, I recommend interested buyers stop by a store and see how it feels first; it is definitely a love-it or hate-it thing). Like most ultra-small laptops, the touchpad is far too inconveniently located and I strongly recommend getting a wireless mouse and disabling it entirely.

The Aspire v5-122p comes preloaded with Windows 8.1, which is only slightly less horrid than Windows 8.0. Unfortunately, driver support for older versions of Windows is difficult to come by. On the other hand, with the use of software such as Classic Shell and Windows Update Notifier (not to mention third-party applications such as Irfanview for images, SumatraPDF for e-books and LibreOffice for word-processing), the dreadful and unintuitive "Modern" interface can be practically obliterated, leaving you with a Win7 or WinXP look, if you so desire. The machine comes pre-installed with the usual useless bloatware, including McAfee Antivirus, Norton Online Backup, a 30-day trial for Microsoft Office 2013 and a host of mostly useless Acer apps (all of which utilize the "Modern" app interface and were thus immediately banished from this machine). Disappointingly, the Skydrive desktop app no longer works with Windows 8.1, so - unless you use your MS Live ID to log-in to your PC - you will be forced to use your web-browser to access Microsoft's cloud storage (I just installed Dropbox instead).

This little ultra-thin netbook is not exceptional piece of hardware in any area, but it is servicable computer. Extremely lightweight, it is easy to carry around anywhere, and its fast boot-time means you can jump right into your workflow with a minimum of wait. It is also fairly inexpensive - I picked up mine for just over $300 - so it won't set you back too much. If you need a portable computer to  complement your primary desktop or laptop, it isn't a bad choice so long as you understand its limits. It's a great machine for surfing the web or doing a quick bit of writing or programming on the road, but if you are interested in gaming or work with CPU-intensive programs you are going to want to look somewhere else.

* without any extensions. With my normal complement of 20 extensions, including Adblock and Ghostery, Firefox takes up to 25 seconds to load. Blame the extensions, not the CPU.