Acer laptop mini review

This new toy kinda got lost in the noise with all the other bits of kit I bought at the end of last year ...

I had to retire my old laptop, a G70-120EA made by Hewlett Packard. The post I did that talks about that one after a couple of weeks is still on this blog, here's a link. I was quite positive towards the G70 back then, it was a lot of laptop for the money. I was also happy to overlook the flaws, like the poor build quality. The Vista experience hadn't quite hit by then, although I'd been getting the UAC popups regularly asking me if I was sure I wanted to do stuff. As a laptop, it did well for about 6 months and then the fan started to die.

The problem with the HP was the location of the fan. It hadn't been built with support in mind, so to replace a simple item like the fan required the disassembly of the entire machine. I guess this is also where the poor build quality came from too. Most engineers will just find a way to make something work, they won't bother making it particularly efficient or clean. Good engineers take a little more pride in their designs and attempt to make them easier to put together, take apart, fix and all those other little things that separate Fiats from Ferraris.

Or Acers from HP's ...

Ahh - that fan. By the time the end came, I'd cut the HP back to 40% cpu power to stop it from overheating. That kept it stable, although it wasn't comfortable with 5's On Demand video service. That didn't last though, with the fan dying the Sunday morning after I'd finished with work for 2009. Cue one emergency trip to the Mall to investigate a replacement ...

After a steady bit of research through the year I'd settled between 2 choices, Apple and Acer. Apple got a look through curiosity at them being "different", with the interest in Acer coming from their reliability record. Apple is still up at the premium end of the market, i.e. too expensive for too few features. My eye got caught by 2 Acers, a 15" and a 17". Good features and cheap. I ended up being seduced by the lure of wrapping my fingers around a few more inches :-)

Out of the box, the Acer (an Aspire 7540) felt heavier than the HP. I'm not bothered about extra weight, it usually means "sturdier". The keyboard seems fairly Apple inspired. I have to class it as "reasonable". I haven't caught my fingers on the keys like on the HP but it does miss the odd keystroke. The trackpad is not great.

The Aspire 7540 came with Windows 7 and the much vaunted Multi-touch and Gesture features. After a couple of days, they got disabled because they just plain got in the way. I think the laptop was getting confused over "is it a click ?" "is he trying to gesture control ?" with the result being much reduced responsiveness to taps on the trackpad. So I just turned off the multitouch features (kept scroll gestures - those work) and trackpad responsiveness improved considerably.

Multitouch gestures tend to be Drag, Zoom and Rotate type operations. Seriously, how often do you alter the Zoom, how often do you Rotate something and isn't it easier to hold a mouse button when you're dragging ? I really can't see any point in the multitouch gestures on a laptop. Touchscreen and tablets - fine, there's no mouse button there. But on a trackpad that's not got the "I'm tapping there" feedback of a touchscreen, nope - gets in the way.

Heh heh heh - that's more a whinge at Windows 7 functionality instead of saying what the laptop's like. Still, keyboard - good, trackpad - poor. I have to be careful when browsing shopping sites because the tap-click of the trackpad can be a little ... random. Sometimes it takes a couple of Big Taps, sometimes it seems to do a click from what must be the electric charge on my fingers. Did I mention it likes to do those phantom clicks when the pointer is over a "Buy" button ? :-)

Muahaha - had to clear out Shopping Baskets a few times cos the laptop is a shopaholic.

The screen is excellent. It claims to have LED technology, which like the tellies is intended to give more definition to those colours. It works too, there's a Facebook game I keep up with that has blocks of colour in its interface that I hadn't noticed on the HP. The screen is 1600x900 so not quite 1080p. There's a HDMI port plus a VGA D-Sub port to allow hooking up to a telly or projector. I've tried both, I have to say I'm impressed with HDMI's ability to send video + audio on the same cable. BBC's Day of the Triffids via iPlayer played pretty well, although the HD version coming from the V+ box looked better.

Memory - 3GB again, same as the G70. Windows 7 seems a little less hungry on memory. The load is currently 50% with 10 Firefox tabs active, as well as iTunes, Outlook and Messenger. On the G70 and Vista the load would be 60-65%, although a couple of the baseline apps are different. I'm still running the baseline McAfee trial instead of Kaspersky and Evemon isn't loaded while my Eve account is inactive.

Software - You get the usual trials, one of those bits being a 60 day trial of McAfee. I've put an opinion of McAfee up before (linky!) and that opinion has sadly been reinforced by my experience on the 7540. There's 2 key performance indicators on Anti-Virus - does it slow the machine down ? does it work. McAfee's update is annoying because it effectively hangs the machine for a few seconds, annoying and unnecessary. Does it work ? NO! I had my Eve account info stolen by a keylogger which slipped through McAfee.

Important lesson when buying new kit - Don't trust that it's ok out of the box, give it a security scan before putting any passwords in. I can't prove where my keylogger came from but one suspicion is that it was on the machine when I opened the box. McAfee did nothing to prevent the keylogger from doing its stuff.

Windows 7 - it's an improvement over Vista. It seems more likable too, although I have a feeling that part of the design brief involved "let's get people looking at their desktop pics more". The sidebar changes are a step back. On Vista, I liked the ability to click the sidebar to bring the gadgets to the front. That's gone from Windows 7, so I had to move my Evemon skill plan window left a bit to keep the sidebar visible. Apart from that, the interface is a logical step forward and works a bit better. I like the ability to Pin programs to the task bar, when starting up I can tap 1,2,3 and Messenger, Outlook and Firefox start up.

Performance - no problems here. I don't push my laptops particularly hard, my key point with them is screen size and having lots of windows open while I listen to iTunes on them. My desktop is the gaming machine. Got my doubts as to whether this puppy has the performance to run graphically demanding games but it was perfectly happy playing that iPlayer video on the telly.

Something I suspect is that a little bit of extra Hamster Power means that it gets more out of the iTunes to remote speaker link. I think it sounds better and gets more detail across but that could just be a placebo effect. Bit like my blu-ray player getting more out of dvds because of having Hamsters On Steroids.

No blu-ray - the G70 had a blu-ray drive. My opinion on this is that blu-ray is a bit of a gimmick. Comparing blu-ray movies to dvds suggests that blu-ray doesn't add that much value in terms of improved picture quality. It is better ... but when you're sitting back and watching the telly from the other side of the room, dvd movies look just as good.

Laptops are Vastly Overrated as movie playing machines. Spending an extra £100 on a Sony BDP-S360 (happily recommend those, I'm a fan of mine) is well worth it due to the extra connectivity it offers. Surround sound adds a lot to movies and it's a lot easier to get that from a standalone player, as trying to do it through the crippleware programs that come with PCs tends to be ... awkward if not doomed. So - sound connectivity means hardly any laptops will be suitable as movie players. Video connectivity is irrelevant as HDMI is the only valid connector here, it's the only one that allows HD playback.

Oh yeah - it's easier to surf forums if the movie is playing back on a different machine than the one you're using for forums and Facebook :-) :-) :-)

Overall - it's got the thumbs up so far. I can live with the quirks of the trackpad (by making sure it doesn't one-click buy stuff!) because it's more than made up for by the overall build quality.

The Acer cost more than last year's HP but I think I got an exceptional deal there last year. Hopefully it will last longer :-)