Acer eMachines e520: Rock this world!

I was thinking a lot why did Acer buy eMachines, a relatively small firm which always had problems keeping its business profitable. Then a few months ago they released their first notebook, the eMachines e510.

Today I got the next notebook which they released, the Acer eMachines e520 and finally I understood that Acer uses eMachines to manufacture cheap yet extremely good notebooks.
Guess the marketing team doesn’t have too much imagination that’s why they changed only one number in the notebook’s name. But the performance of the two notebooks is extremely different. The eMe510 is a good notebook, cheap and has quite good performance. The eM-e510 got even better. The tests I made a real-life tests, not benchmarks. Benchmarks are good for memory and hard disks, but in my humble opinion how a whole system performs can’t really be measured with benchmarking software but with real-life, real production-software tests.

Visually pleasing

Infamous PC manufacturers don’t use too much plastic because they think it doesn’t look good enough. The eMachines e520 even though has a case made completely of plastic, it does look good. The finish is high quality and the silver/alu finish of the inscriptions makes the laptop beautiful. It looks cool when you first look at it.
The 15.4″ WXGA high-brightness LCD has an extremely wide view-angle, the output is easy to read even in very bright environment.
The arrangement of the buttons is very well thought. The keyboard is standard 88\89 keys input device, there is integrated numeric keypad. The touchpad worked perfectly even when it was dusty or even when it was wet. There are only two buttons below the touchpad which kinda makes navigation weird when you are used with 3 button mouses.

The eMachines e520 and multimeda processing

The eM-e520 came with Windows Vista Home Premium already installed. Since Vist uses more memory than XP, I thought HD video playback and playing will be under the acceptable limit. I was wrong.
The first test was watching a true HD movie. Miraculously, the playback was flawless.
Playing was also very pleasing. I installed this time 3 games, World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and F.E.A.R.
All the above were played without any issue, the transactions were flawless even when the details were set to high. OK, F.E.A.R. was a bit slow in high detail mode, but still playable.
The high performance can be conferred to the specifications of the e520 notebook. The model I got had 4 gigabytes of RAM which is more than enough for most of the games I tested the notebook with. The video card is an Intel GMA X4500MHD which has integrated HD decoder and can use up to 384 Mbytes of system memory (Shared).
The processor of the eMachines e520 is not the best, an Intel Celeron M575 working at almost 2 GHz and with 1Mbyte of cache, but is seemingly enough for most of the jobs which a standard user usually performs.

eM-e520 and Operating systems

As I said, the eMachines e520 came with Windows Vista Home Premium already installed. This time I phoned the eMachines support before downgrading to XP, and they told me that they don’t support Windows XP at all, nor they want to help me. Great, I thought.
As always with AHCI enabled hard drives, you have to switch to IDE mode before you can install XP. After you switched to IDE mode, installing any OS is straight forward. In eMachines e520’s case XP will find a very limited number of drivers for the hardware, but after connecting to the internet, I could find every missing driver on the eMachines support website.

Verdict on eMachine e520

The 6 cell batteries lasted more than 3 and a half hours while the notebook was used for office work and more than 2 hours when viewing a HD movie.
The notebook’s price is $500 + VAT where I live, that makes its price quite acceptable. If we take in consideration that we can watch HD movies on the eMachine e520, play resource-heavy games on it and it also has an almost 4 hours battery-life, I’d say the eMachine e520 rocks!

Update: If you’re sick of searching for XP drivers for the eMachines e520, the official support website of eMachines provided them here: http://support.emachines.com/em/driver/nb/e520.html. If you click the link, you will find both Vista and XP drivers, and additionally the users’ manual in PDF format for the eMachines e520.

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