The Acer AS6930 - Simply wow

I think I owe a pack of beer to our supplier for letting me testing this notebook. I tested in the past year about 10 notebooks –also wrote review about 5 or 6 –, but the Acer AS6930 crowned the past year with its performance, stability and, well, coolness.

The Acer AS6930 is simply beautiful: it’s amongst the first Acer notebooks which takes the advantages of the new “Gemstone Blue” (TM) design. And the first advantage for Acer is that — as our supplier said –, the people falls in love with the notebooks which follows the Gemstone Blue line.

The AS6930 notebook is advertised as multimedia notebook. It’s the first notebook which has a 16 inch (yeah, 16″) display and is capable of 16:9 aspect ratio. The 16″ is almost 15% more than what you get with a 15,4″ and this advantage makes the AS6930 perfect for watching HD movies. It has integrated HDMI output which makes perfect for linking the notebook to HDMI projectors or flat-screens.
The native resolution of the Acer HD CineCrystal display is 1366×758 and it performs well in almost any light. I say any, because in heavy sunshine it’s just as useless as any other LCD.

The native Dolby Home Theater support with True 5.1 channel output and the HDMI output revolutionizes the multimedia notebook concept.

The gaming tests were the coolest. We didn’t find ANY game at our supplier which didn’t work well on the Acer AS6930, and we didn’t have mercy when tested it as we’ve found the most resource eating games on the shelves: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, FEAR, Dead Space, Grand Theft Auto IV.
The good performance is the result of the high-end hardware from within the shell:

• the graphics board, a GeForce 9600 GT with 512 MB DDR3 dedicated(!) RAM
• Intel Core 2 Due, T5800 processor working at 2GHz
• 4Gigs of DDR2 RAM

The storage space is kinda generous: 320 Gigs on a hard disk which spins up to max. 5400 revolutions per minute. Installing OSes was easy. Every Microsoft operating system recognized most of the hardware. Switching off AHCI (from the BIOS) in case of ANY Microsoft OS is necessary in this notebook’s case, too.
Finding the drivers for Vista was easy as Acer provided every driver for this notebook on the official support website. In XP’s case there is one issue: there are no drivers provided, because Microsoft hand in hand with the manufacturers makes everything possible to put Vista on as many PCs as possible.
To obtain drivers for the unrecognized hardware, we had to download the XP drivers from each hardware manufacturer’s support website.

The ergonomics were neither forgotten when Acer designed the AS6930. It has a full size keyboard which means that it has all the keys you have on the keyboard of your PC. The reversed “T” touch-pad is sensitive enough and it also has incorporated a biometric fingerprint scanner which assures the AS6930’s user that no one can access the files stored on the notebook. The battery life of the 6-cell LiIon battery is satisfactory, it averages around 3 hours.

And finally my personal thoughts. Where I live the Acer Aspire AS6930 is $1100 with 19% VAT included (around 820 euros). The notebook performed well in any situation and has a quite good battery life, so I think if you have the money to purchase it, do it. The Acer Aspire AS6930 is both beautiful and a power-plant.

Cheap Notebook for Gaming: The Acer AS5520G

It’s quite frustrating to write about this notebook. While the review process of the Acer AS5520G was pleasant, I’m not sure about whether to recommend it or not. Why? While the notebook performed excellently the hardware from within the case is no-name, except the processor and the materials used by Acer are very poor quality.

Acer AS5520G: Appearance

The notebook looks good, that’s sure. It has that typical high-contrast Acer design which attracts the human eye: outside is dark (blackish) inside almost white (grayish). The plastic material is kinda soft, just as the keys of the keyboard. When you press a key you get the feeling that if you press it a bit more, it will brake. It’s very weird.
When you open the lid, the sight is pleasant: Acer chosen for the AS5520G a display with a low response time, 8 ms and which was built with “glare” technology, called by Acer CrystalClear. The display has very good visibility in almost any situation, less in extreme bright environments when the display is much more a mirror.

Performance of the Acer AS5520G

When Acer built this notebook, they were thinking about to create a notebook with very high performance but at very low cost. If we are thinking with clear logic, this is possible only if they put no-name hardware in the case. Starting from the video card, which has an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS chipset, through the modem and lasting with the DVD-RW unit, everything is no-name. This fact however does not have impact on the AS5520G’s performance, but on the liability of the hardware.
In the performance tests the Acer AS5520G performed very well; not a miracle since Acer built it for performance. Three games were installed as usually, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and FEAR. Each game performed excellently even if the details were set to high.
Next test was viewing true high definition movies on the Acer AS5520G. Nonetheless to say that the play was flawless.
The high performance of the Acer AS5520G can be thanked to the high amount of DDR2 RAM, working at 667 MHz, the AMD Turion 64 X2 processor with 1MB L2 cache and working at 2GHz. The video card is a high performance NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS with 512 Megs of dedicated memory.

Final thoughts about the Acer AS5520G

Switching between operating systems was extremely easy since Acer provided each and every driver on its support website. Initially, the Acer AS5520G had Windows Vista Home edition installed; this is in conformity with Acer’s new philosophy which is about to spread genuine Windows Vista. Switching to any other Microsoft OS was easy enough to make me encourage anyone to change the initial OS, who doesn’t like it.
The AS5520G comes equipped with a 6 cell Li-Ion, but since the notebook has extremely high consumers, the notebook doesn’t last more than an hour and a view minutes, even with Vista’s intelligent power management knowledge. Playing a HD movie or playing a game reduces the time the notebook can run on batteries drastically.
Would I recommend it for you? The notebook performed extremely well in any situation, but under high load the temperature of the processor and the video card got hot, around 70 degrees in the case of the video card. The touchpad of the Acer AS5520G stopped responding after two days of use and the system cooler was very noisy.
My final verdict would be that the Acer AS5520G is a good notebook for its price (where I live its about $700), but if you want a reliable notebook, buy something else.

Clevo M570 notebook - The Lamborghini Diablo of the notebooks

Ever heard of Clevo? I didn’t, so when I got the call to test something from this firm my first question was what’s a Clevo. Yeah, shame on me.

So the very beginning of the review is what I’ve learned about Clevo.

Clevo is a notebook and computer peripherals manufacturer from Taiwan. Interesting is, that they ship their notebooks as barebones. That means that the notebooks are half-assembled. But don’t worry, the firm doesn’t deal with end-users but with a very limited number of OEMs, who (custom) build the notebooks, then ship to resellers and end-users. So, when you get the notebook, it’s fully functioning.

Clevo is infamous because of the quality of the materials they use when building their notebooks. M570 is neither an exception. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. The materials for building this notebook are excellent, the mate plastic used is very pleasant and is very resistant to stitches. In one word: the finishes are perfect.

The keyboard is a full size one, something almost normal at 17″ notebooks. My only issue was that as they had to create the space for the numeric pad, they pushed the Home/End/PgDn/PgUp on the top of the cursor buttons and can be reached by pushing the Fn button and the appropriate cursor key simultaneously. I hate this solution and never could get used with it.
The touchpad on the other hand is very simple yet effective. It’s sensitive enough and the two buttons (right and left click) are responsive. I didn’t encounter a problem while using it. Just with like the fingerprint scanner. It always recognized my fingerprint without a single error.

The lid is made almost entirely of aluminum, less the top where is a strip of shiny plastic.
Unlike the other notebook manufacturers, Clevo has kept the old closing system by closing hook. A system which is very secure and easy to use.

The notebook is quite heavy, it has a weight of about 4 kg (all with battery), but I think this is normal; a monster like this with a 17″ LCD on the top of a graphic accelerator, nVidia 8800M GTX, neither is pillow-light. Due to its height, it’s unlikely you will take this notebook to trips. It’s excellent for office job or for home usages though.

The M570R1 from Clevo comes with a 17.1″ WXGA with an aspect ratio of 19 to 10. Unfortunately, the surface of the screen is shiny which makes the usage of the notebook difficult in very bright environments. But every downside has its opposite, namely that the shiny surface gives extremely vivid color and great visibility, even if viewing the screen from wide angles.
Also, it’s also quite annoying that the screen of the M570 suffers from backlight bleeding in about 60-70%, which is more than bad when watching movies.

Gaming and the Clevo M570

The notebook has been tested with 3 games as usual: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and F.E.A.R.
I think it’s better I tell you some specs of the M570R1 first. The CPU is an Intel Core2 Duo T7500 (Merom) wich is working at 2.2 GHz under maximum load and with 4MB L2 Cache. The front side bus is working at 800 MHz. The model I got had 3 Gigabytes of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800M GTX video card, with 512MB GDD3 VRAM.
Now that you know the specs, you can imagine how the above games run on the notebook. Truth is, that the notebook has been made especially for gaming.

The Clevo M570 and different operating systems

Miraculously, Clevo provided all the drivers for all the Microsoft operating systems on a DVD; I mean, every driver. The switch between OSes was the easiest in my career.

Verdict on the Clevo M570

It’s a piece of art! I can recommend it without hesitation for anyone, both gamers and for the business class, too. Its autonomy is excellent in its class: 2 and a half hours for office jobs and browsing and an hour and 20 minutes for gaming.
Is this a must buy? Yes, even if it’s around $2300 (~€1800) where I live.

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.

Enable Mart - helping the people in need

OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh title, but still. I work with a few people with disabilities and always wondered why the software developers don’t create for them software which really works and is useful in the same time. There’s Microsoft’s speech recognition on Windows Vista, but that’s extremely far from being useful, Magnifier on the other hand is useful for those who’s sight is limited, then the text-to-voice software which is more like a useless piece of code because it’s hard to understand what the robot-like sound tries to tell. I never understood why a man with a disability like blindness can’t use a PC and always blamed the PC software developers.

Today my opinion has changed, thanks to EnableMart. EnableMart provides assistive technology for people with disabilities, products which really makes difference for those with any type of disability. They feature 9 categories, including mobility, hearing and vision assisting software and gadgets, and even complete access suites. They provided assistive tech for people in 50 states and more than 45 countries already, that means they ship worldwide which kinda shocked me since I reviewed some other shops, too within the industry and there are extremely few shops which do this for their customers.
Another interesting aspect of their website is that they have a live support system and toll free phone number; again something which is very rare and can be extremely useful.
Navigating on some shops’ website can be a pain. EnableMart’s website was easy to navigate, their search system returned results I expected, not what the webiste back-end thought would be interesting for me. On-site financing also available but if I’m not mistaken only in the US; again, very useful since some products are expensive.

If you’re in search for software or tools which can assist you, check the website I linked to about. They really rock and I’m kinda pleased I found this webiste.

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