Review of the Fission 10.1” Netbook – $299 At Aldi – Not Recommended As It Sounds Like An Insect
In early Feb, I wrote about Aldi selling a new Netbook – The Fission 10.1” Netbook for $299. I need a new Netbook for Uni so I can type up my lectures notes because my current Netbook from Aldi, the Medion Akoya E1210 battery lasts a massive 5 minutes now after about 3 years of use in lectures for the past 2 years.
So I went to Aldi, to pick up my new Netbook. My Aldi store had plenty of them there, and if you know a bit about Aldi, if there is a lot of the same item left after 5 days from being sold, it is usually crap – and this Netbook was no exception.
The Touchpad
The reason of a Netbook is to be able to use it in spaces you don’t have much room in like in chairs, lecture theatres, airplanes, and cars. Because you don’t have much room, you don’t usually have room for a mouse, so you heavily rely on the touchpad. This is my 4th laptop I have had, and by far, it is the worst touchpad I have every used. In fact, I am returning the laptop back to Aldi for this very reason. Have you ever seen an elderly person use a laptop touchpad for the first time? Do you know how frustrating it is watching them use it as they just can’t get the mouse over the icon – well, this was it was like. The touchpad really only recognised your finger moving horizontally and vertical, and even then, it doesn’t like those movements. If you move it diagonally, it either doesn’t sense the input at all, or it moves horizontally then vertically. There is no smooth diagonally control. Actually, moving the mouse in any direction is not smooth, and it jerks around. You can actually move your finger and the mouse doesn’t even move at all!
The Operating System
When you first unbox the Netbook for the first time, and boot it up, you go straight into the Operating System; unlike the Medion Brand laptops I purchased from Aldi where you go through prompts to setup your computer like setting a computer name, and user accounts names. To change all this for the Fission Netbook, you have to go into each relevant section in the OS and change it.
This Netbook uses Windows 7 Starter Edition, and I quite like Windows 7, but Starter Edition, to me, feels like I have gone back to Windows 98 – but with just fancier graphics. If you ever buy a new computer/laptop/netbook, do not get it with Windows 7 Starter! It is bad.
When boot up the Netbook, you’ll notice that the copy of Windows isn’t even a genuine (see the bottom left hand corner).
So before you can start using Windows, you have to validate the OS with the product key which can be found underneath the Netbook. In doing so, the pretty little desktop background turned black while I was validating it, and one reason I don’t like Windows 7 Starter is that you can’t change the desktop background without performing some sort of hack. So now I am stuck with this Netbook with a black screen – it’s not good.
Disk Partitions
The other thing I don’t like how this Netbook was set up is how the disks have been partitioned. Yes, it may be fine in some situations, but I don’t think this is the way to go to setup an OS on a Netbook. With all my other laptops and desktops I have purchased, D drive is a smaller drive and contained files such as drivers and other recovery files (like D drive on this does), and C drive was larger that contained everything else. It is like that they incorrectly assigned the wrong drive letters to the partitions. I think the drive should be swapped around. I tried repartitioning the disk sizes in Disk Management, but it failed, so I just gave up.
The Noise
So I have the Netbook turned on sitting on my desk while I use my desktop PC. Then I hear a noise and think it’s the Cicada’s that are outside. However, on a closer inspection it is in fact the Netbook. If you are not sure what Cicada’s sound like, Wikipedia has some audio of them. And I can’t believe how much the Netbook sounds like them – it’s astonishing.
The Brand
The other issue I would like to bring up is the Brand. On the box, it is marketed as Fission – an Aldi Brand. But the OS, OEM sticker all says it’s from Great Wall (English Translation). I am not sure if they are related to Great Wall Motors in anyway.
The Keyboard and Other Stuff
The keyboard is a little different, they keys a quite a bit smaller then my other 10” Netbook, so it may take a little time to get used to it. When typing, you will notice that they keys go a fair way down, and typing is quite loud on it because of that. One thing I do find useful, is that the power button is on the outside of the Netbook, not the inside, so you can switch it on, then open the screen, which makes boot time a little quicker as you don’t have to open the screen to turn it one which can take a while. Opening the screen is a little tough, the hinge seems very tight.
For those wondering how long the battery lasts, it lasts for 5 hours.
Conclusion
In the end, I will not recommend anyone to purchase the Aldi Fission 10” Netbook. It is the worst laptop I have purchased (mainly due to the OS, Noise, and Touchpad), and I will be returning it to Aldi soon.
If you have purchased this Netbook, what are your thoughts on it? Do you like it?
I bought one for my son, but it’s going back.
I’ve had five laptops over the years, from an EeePC 701 up. There’s something about this laptop (choice of plastics, how surfaces line up, how things feel, little subjective things) that while they’re not enough on their own to be deal breakers, all add up to give the impression of something that is just poorly designed.
Good designers can make products which are cheap to manufacture, but don’t sacrifice the perception of quality. This laptop comes across as either having been slapped together in a hurry in a desperate bid to get a somewhat tired design to market, or done by engineers who really don’t know what they’re doing. Either way, it’s hardly confidence inspiring.
There’s a review of the laptop on APC:
http://apcmag.com/notebookhunter/fission-101in-netbook.htm
It’s obvious to me that all APC’s done is regurgitate the specs. I really can’t imagine them giving a score of 9.5/10 if they’d ever tried it.
On the hardware side, the thing that concerns me most is the design of the display hinge. There’s a triple whammy here of really ordinary plastic, hinge arms which flex because they are designed too thin for the job they do, and a design that makes these hinge arms longer than they should be. To me, it invites an unfortunate situation where the display gets accidentally over-rotated, breaking the arms.
There’s just something wrong about the case plastic. Think for a moment about LEGO bricks. You’d be hard pressed to break a LEGO brick, even the longer ones. That plastic is such tough stuff. Laptops often use a similar plastic in high stress areas. This laptop uses plastic more reminiscent of a McDonald’s toy .
The final straw for me is that I bought the machine to run Linux, as I’ve got better things to do than keep cleaning viruses off my son’s laptop. Despite having nearly 20 years of experience with Linux, I was unable to get the laptop to stay suspended, even after unloading every kernel module and starting with init=/bin/bash into (essentially) a recovery shell. The machine would suspend but immediately unsuspend, with nothing of note in the system log.
If the PC was otherwise ok, I’d probably go through the pain of logging bug reports, recompiling kernels with debug options on, etc, but really, this is the last straw. $300 is looking too expensive when for $10 more, I can buy an HP at MSY that I know will work just fine with Linux.
The best thing I can say about this laptop is that it’s likely covered under Aldi’s 60 day you-don’t-like-it,-you-bring-it-back policy. It’s why I bought it from Aldi (it’s always a punt buying computers to run Linux on them) and it’s why I will feel no guilt in taking it back. Of course, I’ll do my utmost to have it in saleable condition when I do.
Hi Mitch, I would just like to say thanks for your in-depth review.
I would have to agree with everything point that you make.
I myself found that the out-of-the-box experience was incredibly poor, like you said it was either slapped together or had poor engineers working on it. What company sells at laptop with a 200GB HDD, were the C drive is only 30GB, and where the Operating System isn’t even validated when you first get it. This laptop just felt cheap, like one of those $99 kids learning laptops you get.
In my opinion, the hinge for the screen was very tight. I didn’t bother looking at it in great detail though.
As for APC, I don’t even think they reviewed it. They just looked at the specifications, and though “wow, this is great”. I’d rather by the MSI Wind from BigW for $258 http://www.bigw.com.au/electronics/computers-office/computers/bpnBIGW_0000000259676/msi-10-netbook-u135-dx which is the exact same as the Medion Akoya E1210 Aldi sold a few years ago (which I purchased and think it’s great – much better quality then the Fission).
I didn’t try to put linux on, I even had trouble re-partitioning the disks.
I am so glade Aldi had a 60 return policy, because if it didn’t, I would probably throw it in the trash because I wouldn’t be able to stand using it.
But that could probably be just me as the touch pad didn’t work that great on my machine. If that worked properly, I probably wouldn’t have been so negative about it on the review.
Thanks again for your input Mitch.
Hi guys,
my over all impression of this pc was ok.
I have installed a solid version of linux on it with not one prob at all.
for 300 bucks i have a solution to suit my mobile pc needs and quite like it.
very time.
i us this pc to interrogate lots of different telco equipment and works fine.
I will say the touch pad is pretty bad but nothing a blue tooth mouse does nt fix.
Dan
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for your input. It’s good that you agree with me that the touchpad is bad, however, using a bluetooth mouse can be somewhat inconvenient if you lack the space around you.
Does it suspend? Which distro?
I bought one myself… at $300 I thought it was to much of a bargain to ignore… like everyone else here the touch pad is pretty bad… but like Daniel I bought a blue tooth mouse.
Overall I’ve had no problems with the netbook, I only use it for email, surfing, blogging, and word processing…and it does a fine job.
Thanks for your input.
Since I need a netbook, I purchased a HP Mini from OfficeWorks. It was much better than the Aldi Fission one.
Hi guys, I bought one of the ALDI Fission Notebooks in late April 2011 and only paid $249.00 for it, it was probably run out stock as there were only a few left at a couple of isolated stores. While I have no previous experience with Net books, I have lots of experience with Desk Tops and Notebooks.
Yes, the Windows 7 came up as not being valid but once I changed it to the Product key on the page of the machine all was good. At $249.00 it does everything that I want it to do, which is checking my email, keeping an eye on a couple of web sites that I follow and helping me keep in touch with the family at home whilst I am travelling overseas.What else could you want and it was $86.00 cheaper than a brand machine which wasn’t up to the specs of this little girl. I guess some people are hard to please.
I belive, Aldi discounts products (where you see the red price tag) when another customer has returned the product due to dissatisfaction, or that it was a demo.
I agree netbooks will do what you want, but you didn’t have an issue with the touchpad like I did?
JWM,
i was just wondering if you still have the driver cd file that was on the hard drive? i have changed the hard drive out and i cannot find get the Bluetooth to work anymore, any ideas anyone?
Hi CW,
Off memory, I don’t think the laptop came with any CD’s. All of the files that you are looking for should be on the D:/ Drive – See [url]http://www.jackcola.org/blog/102-what-is-the-recovery-d-drive-on-my-computer[/url].
The other alternative is to go into Device Manager (here [url]http://www.jackcola.org/faq?catid=2&faqid=28[/url]), find the bluetooth device, and go “update driver”.
Please help me to fix the error of my Fission 10.1″ netbook.
How do i fix cause i try to fix it..i need the default setup on this..cause we try to update this but now it not working the wifi. hope to response for this concern.thank you.