I could be late to write review on the laptop model of Acer I own which I bought a year back, this model belongs to Acer Aspire 5100 series, I bought this laptop from the authorized dealer ACE brain for Acer laptop in Pune near Durwankar hotel. The buying experience of this laptop was horrendous, I selected Acer Aspire 5101ANWLMi model and applied for finance facility and after 2-3 days post approval, I was shocked to see a used laptop put on display in the showroom packed again for me and given sealed in a box.
The worst part was the shop owner’s forgot to delete data and movies stored in second partition of the hard disk and as far as I knew laptop manufacturer’s do not partition hard disk by default, I had to spend another week waiting for a new laptop to arrive which they gave me without a box and was bought from some warehouse near Pune by their staff to avoid paying Octroi on a box pack laptop, so the new laptop was delivered to me in a Targus laptop bag, I had to do all kind of checks on the laptop before taking the delivery and had to literally threaten the shop owner to lodge a consumer forum which happened to be nearby his shop at Grahak Peth in Pune. I was not delivered free 1 GB pen drive offered complimentary along with the laptop, I gave up on that. My requirement in a laptop was to deliver stable performance to work upon MS-Office files, few other applications, web browsing and playing few games.
So here’s my laptop configuration: AMD Turion 64 MK-36(2 GHz, single core) ATI Radeon Xpress 1100 video memory, 60 GB Seagate PATA HDD 256 MB DDR2 533 MHz Ram(Too Low), 15.4” screen with CrystalBrite technology from Acer 8X Dual Layer DVD" RW/DVD-RAM Broadcom 802.11b/g Wireless Network Realtek HDA Sound Card This laptop is not very light and weighs above 2 kg’s, also compared to the range of laptop’s available today this laptop would loose out to some advanced multimedia features and glossy outer cover available in different colours for current generation of laptop’s. however it deliver’s on basic performance, gives battery back up of up to 3 hours on normal usage, keeping screen on full bright mode would reduce the battery life, this laptop has a 6-cell battery and comes with Linux DOS based OS, I then installed Windows XP Professional edition with SP2, which works fine on this machine, I recently upgraded the RAM for this laptop with Transcend 2 GB DDR2 RAM, post which the laptop is zooming fast on handling different functions while operating. Screen display quality is good and you can control display functions through ATI Radeon video settings control function, wireless browsing on the laptop is good, it has good reception quality of signals, only problem which I was made aware of before buying this laptop was the heating problem with AMD processors, which does heat up at times, but not extreme as quoted by few friends of mine.
I have worked with applications like Photoshop CS, Bryce 3D application, on 256 MB RAM, still the processor delivered good output in terms of performance. Speaker quality of laptop is average and not amusing enough for audiophiles like me, had decent experience while watching few movies on VLC media player. There is only one USB port in the left side of the laptop, and 2 ports have being located behind, which is quiet strange, it has 5-in 1 card reader, PC Card slot and a Ethernet port. In the other I/O ports it has 4-Way Scroll Button-Keyboard-Touchpad, VGA Port, DC-in, Mic-in, Speaker/Headphone out jack, Line-in, this laptop meets performance standards required to do normal computing activity, not ideal for gaming and to work on resource heavy applications, not too high on performance for multimedia and gaming. Laptop’s like Dell Inspiron 1525 and Acer Aspire 5920 are good laptop’s to consider buying currently for a price range under Rs. 40, 000.