Archive for the ‘Acer’ Category

Newer Entries »

Acer Aspire AS9504WSMI

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I really like this laptop and use it to do video editing and computer graphics work. Rendering is fast and smooth. The screen is very clear and crisp. I was expecting this to be super heavy, but its actually not bad. I was excited aabout the ability to watch tv on my laptop, but the dvb-t tv tuner that should have come with my laptop, didnt. The manual says that this tuner is optional, so maybe mwave.com chose not to include it. Or they forgot it. I am willing to buy the antenna separately, but ive looked all over the internet, and its not being sold anywhere. I went to the acer site for more info, but their site is terrible. I tried filling out their question form, but their form page isnt even online. (URL does not exist error)I can attach the laptop to my cable from my wall and watch cable tv, but the whole point of having a tv tuner with a laptop is to be able to watch tv wirelessly! I would like to get basic antenna broadcasts, but apparently need to have this ‘optional antenna’ that isnt sold anywhere on this planet. The built-in Acer software is a bit annoying. When I boot up my computer, it assumes i will be connecting to a wired broadband connection so it enables my LAN card and disables my wireless card. I actually have a wireless router in my house so i just need my wireless enabled and my LAN disabled. I switch these settings and try to save them, but it always reverts back to the defaults when you reboot. (so its a pain to turn by wireless card back on every time i turn on my laptop) I ended up uninstalling their software because it annoyed me. I also think its weird that they used the FAT32 file system to format their drives. I reformated the 2nd drive to NTFS which is faster and can handle bigger files sizes.

The Acer Aspire 9504WSMi, with Windows XP Media Center Edition, is a good entertainment notebook that has the power to serve as an office workhorse. The sheer breadth of its features is impressive. However, this Aspire doesn’t quite get everything right; in particular, the speakers and the keyboard don’t do justice to this sturdy black-and-silver unit.

I liked the screen, a dazzling 17-inch display with an easy-to-read WXGA+ resolution of 1440 by 900 pixels. The laptop’s 120GB 5400-rpm hard drive is top of the line, and the multiformat DVD burner is the same sleek, slot-fed type found on Apple notebooks.

The entertainment applications–for TV, DVD movies, music, and photos–and the hardware required to support them, including a built-in TV tuner and a remote control, mesh nicely for the most part. Moreover, the 9504WSMi offers the rare option of instant-on TV, which saves you the hassle of turning on the notebook and launching Media Center Edition just to catch the evening news. Acer’s stand-alone Arcade software, with its dedicated controls on the front of the notebook, also plays movies, music, and photos at the press of a button, so you don’t have to start Windows to enjoy your media. Bonus audiovisual connections include a DVI-D port for taking in a movie on your flat-panel screen and ports for downloading camcorder and VHS video, a plus for home-movie aficionados. Five USB ports, conveniently scattered all over the case, handle other peripherals.

Battery life is good for this big, 8.5-pound notebook, at a little more than 3 hours on one charge. And its speed was red-hot in our tests, earning a WorldBench 5 score of 99–no surprise since the 9504WSMi is loaded with high-performance components, including a 2-GHz Pentium M 760 processor and 2GB of RAM.

Considering all you get, the $2299 price is not bad, but several compromises become noticeable drawbacks. One is the keyboard, which will make number crunchers happy with its dedicated numeric keypad but will disappoint touch typists despite its size. The right Shift key is no bigger than a regular alphanumeric key, and the arrow and question mark keys are half-size. To advance pages you must use the keypad, which is too far away to reach easily and clumsily separates the PgUp and PgDn keys with the right arrow key. The four-way scroll button is a nice bonus, but it feels flimsy.

My other beefs are with the stereo speakers–which lack a subwoofer and distort a bit at high volume (something resonates inside the case)–and with the lack of a docking station. None of these failings are deal breakers alone; put them all together, however, and the 9504WSMi is not the most attractive entertainment-cum-desktop-replacement option.

Upshot: So-so sound and a cramped keyboard limit this otherwise well-equipped desktop replacement and entertainment laptop.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Aspire | No Comments »

Acer Aspire 5920-6954

Monday, October 13th, 2008

I needed a gaming and college computer for daughter. Bought this for $835. Set it up with various games and set the graphics on high to test 8600 and found excellent results. The video card was fast enough with the dedicated memory to handle all the games she couldn’t play before with her desktop. The movie playback was NG, I first thought the HD dvd drive was defective because of stalling but instead installed Nero Showtime and found that everything was all working great. The soundcard and speakers (including the subwoofer) sounded great. The software onboard was typical crap. Vista in the video games gave no problem at all, worked well. The ram for the price is good enough but every body knows you can never have enough. The case is sturdy which is great, stops the motherboard flex problems that allot of other laptops have. Battery lasted 3 hrs. installing and setting it up till I realized it wasn’t plugged in, it let me know in plenty of time.

The Acer Aspire 5920-6954 just slips under the $1000 mark, at $999 (as of 2/7/08); it’s worth every penny. Except for business applications, which it lacks, this Vista Home Premium laptop has just about everything home-office buyers could ask for in a solid budget notebook.

The notebook looks different without being too flashy. It has a black-and-cream-colored case set off by blue accents, including a big, easy-to-press triangle-shaped shortcut key set in the corner of the keyboard like a high-tech sapphire (hence Acer’s so-called “gemstone” designation).

At 7.3 pounds, the Aspire 5920-6954 is the heaviest budget laptop we looked at, but it has a 250GB hard drive and a fairly nice 15.4-inch screen (it’s a bit too reflective). Though it lacks a few things like Bluetooth, the 5920-6954 is the most high-definition-ready unit here, including both an HDMI port and an HD DVD reader. It has a subwoofer for better-than-average sound and a handy volume wheel. The terrific keyboard boasts loads of shortcut buttons that do everything but take out the trash. One set, on the left side of the keyboard, launches applications. A second, right-hand row controls multimedia, including an instant-on button that lets you play music and movies without launching Windows. A button placed between the mouse buttons scrolls documents in all four directions.

Finally, this is the only sub-$1000 laptop we reviewed that had a dedicated graphics chip–an nVidia GeForce 8600M GS with 256MB of memory. Thus it was the only one powerful enough to properly play the 3D games in our tests such as Doom 3 and Far Cry. Its frames-per-second rates weren’t the highest we’ve recorded for a laptop, but are more than enough for smooth, glitch-free play.

Equipped with a 1.66-GHz Core 2 Duo T5450 and 2GB of memory, the Aspire 5920-6954 earned a solid WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 70, the second best on the budget laptops chart. The score is five points higher than the group average of 65, and it’s one point better than the average of 70 earned by the 16 recently tested all-purpose notebooks in any price range. Battery life was average, lasting 3.8 hours.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Aspire | No Comments »

Acer Aspire ONE

Monday, October 13th, 2008

This 2lb 8.9″ laptop is fabulous. the screen is good sized and the LCD brightness quality is adjustable from dim to bright. There’s a plentiful 3 USB ports, VGA out, mic in and audio out. This netbook comes with a webcam and mic so you really won’t need a mic in. There’s a SD card slot for transferring photos to your netbook and a kensington security slot for locking down your netbook to something unmovable. Overall, the keyboard quality is fairly good for something this small. Response is good but the the touch pad mouse is something that is not well liked. It’s small and the left and right clickers are difficult to tap, almost requiring a sturdy press. But that’s not a huge problem because you can plug in a USB mouse to it. The netbook is stylish and the LCD hinges are STURDY. The wireless network card is quick and responsive, locking into my wireless network at home without problems. I read that many users have problems with the noisy fan but I really do not hear fan. In fact, I think the newer models might be fanless!

Popularity: unranked [?]

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Aspire | No Comments »

Acer Travelmate 8100

Monday, October 13th, 2008

The well-equipped TravelMate 8100 makes it easy and fun to do almost anything–except watch DVDs.

Wider screen. Sleeker case. Easier upgrades. The Acer TravelMate 8100 offers several advantages over its predecessor, last year’s impressive TravelMate 8000, which the company is still selling. The 8100 weighs about the same–6.4 pounds including an integrated DVD burner–yet boasts an impressively large 15.4-inch wide-aspect screen for working on documents side by side more easily. (The native 1680-by-1050-pixel resolution renders screen elements slightly small but crisp and perfectly readable.)

The unit slopes to a slim 1.3 inches in front, and the lower case is slightly deeper than the closed screen to protect it from bumps and to leave exposed the front ports. Those connections include microphone and headphone jacks in addition to a five-in-one card reader and handy Bluetooth and Wi-Fi buttons that both control wireless communications and serve as glowing status indicators. Three of the four USB 2.0 ports now sit on the right side of the case instead of the left, a welcome change for right-handed folks like me.

The 8100 is fully user upgradable: You can access both RAM slots, and although the hard drive does not slide out of the side (as it does on the 8000), it’s still easy to reach in a compartment on the bottom. Also, the 8100′s battery pops off the rear, not out of a bottom bay–another small improvement.

The 8100 isn’t superior to the 8000 in every way: For example, its battery life was actually slightly lower than that of its older sibling: The 8100 lasted a little over 4 hours on one charge in our tests, about a half hour shorter than the TravelMate 8000 we tested last year. Still, that’s well above average.

On our test bench, the 8100 performed well, doing better than its sibling. It pulled down a WorldBench 5 score of 94 (compared with the 8000′s score of 89), about what I would expect from a 2-GHz Pentium M 760-equipped laptop loaded with 1GB of RAM. Although Acer advertises the 8100 as its mainstream laptop, it’s loaded, with a capital L. It has a removable right-side double-layer DVD burner that swaps out for a second hard drive or a second battery, it has a FireWire port, and it offers three ways to connect an external monitor (via VGA, S-Video, and DVI-D). Those who prefer key cards to fingerprint readers for thwarting break-ins at the BIOS, password, and file levels will appreciate the 8100′s smart card slot, stacked atop a standard PC Card slot on the left side of the case. You get two cards with your purchase, including one that can be set up as a one-time-use emergency card. (After that, you have to return the laptop to a dealer for resetting, which is one reason I slightly favor a biometric security solution.)

The TravelMate’s ergonomic keyboard curves 5 degrees upward on the ends so you end up positioning your elbows in a way that experts say helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s an acquired taste. Besides that, I like everything else about the keyboard, including its short, hard 2.7-millimeter key depression (rather than the standard 3mm) and handy set of four user-programmable shortcut buttons.

Acer includes some nice software extras. For instance, the proprietary power management utility makes it extremely easy to specify customized power schemes, including whether the FireWire port and wireless scanning are enabled. Acer’s GridVista, based on Dritek System’s utility for dragging and dropping applications into preset windows on the extrawide screen, looked worthwhile, but I couldn’t get it to work on our unit.

The only area in which the 8100 stumbles is entertainment. Letterboxed DVD movies looked fine on the wide-aspect screen, but sound from the front-mounted stereo speakers was too faint. Hardware volume control is limited to annoying combination keystrokes. Looking up information in the user manuals could be simpler, too. The Acrobat manual preinstalled on the hard drive is more detailed than the basic printed manual, but it has no index. At first, I thought that it also lacked a contents page, but that page simply turned out not to be bookmarked.

Upshot: Except for slightly shorter battery life, the TravelMate 8100 is a better machine than the 8000, which translates into sleek, powerful, well-equipped portable computing for a commensurate $2299.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: , ,
Posted in Travelmate | No Comments »

sddsds

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

dsddsds

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Acer | No Comments »

Newer Entries »