Ranting, Tips and Tricks about the Aigo

Everything about the famous Aigo MID UMPCs
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Kyodai
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Joined: Fri May 15, 2015 7:33 pm

Ranting, Tips and Tricks about the Aigo

Post by Kyodai »

After living and fumbling a lot with the Aigos I have tried to collect some thoughts about them and what to keep in mind when buying one.


So let's start with some positive thoughts:

- Generally I still like all Aigo because of the Intel Atom Z500 - which is the best chip regarding power saving. Don't think any other UMPC can compete with that.

- I like the tiny footprint. Yes the F-07c is smaller but besides that one it's still the smallest UMPC ever.

- I like how they crammed so much stuff in there. 3G? Wifi? Bluetooth? Touchscreen? Micro SD slot? Full size USB? 2 Cameras? and and and.




Now about the negative thoughts:

- No mouse stick. WHY? Screw the "Smart key", noone wants it! Touch-Screen only sucks!

- BIOS/Drivers support is a nightmare. Yes some "original" Aigo can be made to actually work with wifi/Bluetooth/etc in Windows XP, but many clones (Itelco, ALice, etc) just suck when it come to Windows drivers and BIOS. Who had the stupid idea to rewire the Keyboard on the Italian ones?

- 4 GB SSD being actually "2 x 2 GB". THE FUCK? Whoever came up with that idea should be teared and feathered. Noone needs a second drive. really.

- The keyboard kinda sucks as soon as you need to type numbers. Yeah the chiclet style keyboards have always been kinda thin line, but having to hold "fn" to type any number really sucks. If you thought the Sony UX keyboard was terrible wait till you use an Aigo keyboard...



General insight:

- The "4GB" (2 x 2GB) versions kinda suck for everything. Yeah Windows XP is "somehow" possible with a slimed down version (Hello "tiny XP"), but otherwise you won't get far. I tried slimming down Windows 7 to the point where it just bluescreens, but never been able to install it on a 2GB system drive. Same for Mac OSX.

- The "Itelco" and other branded versions suck for the screwed up keyboard. Having to decide between "touchscreen" or "Working keyboard" is terrible in Windows XP. And even sacrificing keyboard I never managed to get Wifi or Bluetooth running on the Itelco.

- That weird naming scheme! Few people will understand the difference between Aigo P8880 and Aigo P8861H. Know what? Me neither! I tried to shed some light in the OEM variants thread, but even to me some variants differences aren't really clear. Same for the BIOS versions! What's the difference between 047AT01 and 110AT07? 110AT07 seems to be newer. Yeah no idea. Being needlessly cryptic i guess.

- The out-of-the-box Linux versions suck. There were some fan made Ubuntu versions out there which kinda nail it down to a working system but the stock ones were terrible.
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