Acer Aspire One Happy 2

Of its Aspire One Happy netbooks Acer says ‘Sweet, scented, sharp or fresh, no matter how you like your world, the Aspire One Happy lets you paint it the way you want it'. Our test sample featured a white and yellow finish, which Acer refers to as ‘Banana Cream' and given that the other netbooks here sport a unique colour, the Aspire One Happy had no trouble fitting in.

Compared to some of the other Acer netbooks we've come across the Happy 2 only features Windows 7 Home Starter rather than a dual-boot option with Android filling in as the other operating system (OS).

Beneath the colourful exterior the Acer is a somewhat imbalanced machine. With a weight of just 1.036kg the Acer is the lightest netbook in this grouptest but despite this fact, it's far from ideal to travel with because it only sports a 3-cell battery as standard. So, when we ran our intensive battery benchmark the machine managed a battery time of just two hours and one minute. Given that Packard Bell's Dot S is priced identically but yet offers a 6-cell battery, the Aspire One Happy 2 seems unnecessarily expensive.

When it came to application performance however the netbook was a little more competitive. It even managed to swing the fastest boot time, taking just 50 seconds to load Windows 7 Home Starter.