Acer Aspire ES1-111M-C414

I bought one of these little Acer netbooks many years ago for my kids, but they soon outgrew it:

  • The CPU is a feeble Celeron N2840 clocked at 2.16 GHz
  • It shipped with Windows 8
  • The 32GB EMMC storage is too small to upgrade to Windows 10 (or do anything serious with it)
  • The 2GB of RAM made even web browsing painful
  • It was constantly plagued with trackpad issues

A few years back I decided to install on it, and in 2020 it still runs Hera and Firefox quite well.

But using it without a mouse was still a pain, so I decided to apply Zach Poff’s touchpad fix, which so far has worked beautifully.

ground wire soldered to pad
Zach's photo (mine was not so neat)

For reference, this is the RAM that shipped with mine, which I replaced with an equivalent 8GB DIMM:

the measly 2GB or RAM
I replaced this with a Crucial CT102464BF160B 8 GB
(DDR3L, 1600 MT/s, PC3L-12800, SODIMM, 204-Pin)

Sadly, there is no easy way to upgrade storage (there are traces leading to where a SATA connector should be, and I can’t replace the EMMC on my own).

Post-Upgrade Notes

With the touchpad fix and 8GB of RAM in place, the ES1 is a great casual development machine (’s Code editor, in particular, is pretty awesome, and I’ve always loved its terminal), with both Firefox and running well enough for this to be a light, throwaway thin client for short vacations.

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