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.

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.

Country bans: Good or not?

During my daily routine, when I check all the sites I have to, Google Webmaster Group, and other forums I visit, I noticed a, well… Let’s say trend: more and more webmasters think that it’s a good idea to ban whole countries from their websites and servers. So is this wise or just a result of a momentary panic?

Let’s see first why would do it? The most convenient explanation would be that you get attacks, let it be SPAM or DOS, from a specific country and to stop it, you just ban the whole country. Let’s say you have a basic server, running Apache. To ban a country is quite easy, you supply a feed with the IPs you want to ban and you’re done. Even with IPTables would be easy enough to ban a country, say most half an hour with searching included.
Let’s take a small number of aggressive clients, say 1.000 clients concurs for connection to the servers/website, and you decide to ban a whole country. The most offensive country at the moment of this post is China. China has approximately 1/6 of the World’s population. Basically if you ban 1 billion people from accessing your site just because of those 1.000 who are attacking it, well… it’s pity. You can only lose, mostly visitors coming from search engines. You will have you webserver standing steadily, but you lost revenue, as visitors equals revenue. And as a general rule of the thumb, the aggressive clients WILL give up after a moment, switch off the server, shut down the ports they are using for an hour, something, anything, but ban a whole country?!

The second case, you ban countries just because you don’t offer anything for those countries. Or you think you don’t offer.
This was very painful for me to learn, but for some reason big corporations’ webmasters do it often, and it’s so frustrating. I test a lot of IT equipment, usually stuff which didn’t appear yet in my country, I try to visit the manufacturer’s website to download a driver and I can not, because the IP I have, and all the country has, is banned from the server I want to access! How foolish…

Recent case is one of my tests with an eMachines notebook. I knew the firm is owned by Acer, yet Acer has no drivers for eMachines equipments. I check the website, emachines.com and miracle: I can’t access it, it times out. This is a common case when your IP is banned on server level, since the server won’t serve you anything, no 403 message, no nothing, not even a single ICMP package. So I tried to access the website through a server which is located in a different country, still in Europe. No luck. After a few more tries with EU servers, I try with a US server, located in Dallas. And what a joy: I could access the above link. Later I tried with a Canadian server and I could access the website. In total, I tested it with 46 servers which are under my management, and ONLY the US and Canadian servers could fetch the site.
Yet, eMachines started to export notebooks in my country and since they are cheep, people buy it like sugar, but their only option is the provided driver CD/DVD… which is not good for XP
So if you need an XP driver for something, you either code it for yourself (i know), or you switch to Vista as the drivers provided on that media is good only for this OS.

So, what do you think, is it good to ban a whole country or not?

Acer eMachines E510 - The beauty and the beast

In the past few days I was able to test an eMachines E510 notebook, fabricated by Acer.

The notebook’s design is quite nice, the case is black and the LCD is high quality, bright and my only issue with it was the reflections. It’s like a mirror, you can see yourself in it. Quite annoying.

The processor of the notebook is a an Intel Celeron with a FSB working at 533 MHz, the clock speed is 2.13 GHz and 1 Meg of cache. The notebook is shipped with 2 gigs of memory so in combination with the processor, this computer is an extremely good choice for, even advanced and graphics, animations heavy office work.

For the sake of why not, I decided to try to view a HD video (720p). For my shock, it was played smoothly. As the E510 has an additional VGA port to send the video output to an external device, for example a HD Ready TV-set with VGA input port, the eM-E510 is excellent for viewing high definition clips and movies directly on your television.

Usually notebooks are not recommended for playing games. This rule applies on the eMachines E510 too. Even though the processor speed and the amount of RAM is high enough for playing mid-range games like the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, when i tried playing it, the performance was poor. This is the result of the low-end video-card integrated in the system, an Intel GMA X3100 with shared memory (up to 358MB).

The notebook comes with preinstalled, bootable Linux. Changing the OS can give some headaches for the beginner user. By default, the SATA mode is set to AHCI, Advanced Host Controller Interface. If you let it as is, setting up *any* type of Windows will fail.
My first test was to install Windows XP Professional, but while setup, the installer couldn’t find the installed HDD, a Hitachi 160 Gig (5200 rpm). This could be solved only by setting the SATA mode to IDE, when the installer ran without any issue. The next issue appeared when, after the first boot Windows informed me about some missing drivers: for the Broadcom LAN card, the video card and the High Definition Audio sound card. I thought not a problem, since I got with the notebook a DVD containing additional software and drivers. I was wrong: the DVD contained drivers ONLY for Vista, so my only option was to download the drivers from the internet, but since the LAN card wasn’t working, the option wasn’t plausible.
To install Windows XP on an eMachines E510, you have to switch the SATA Mode from AHCI to IDE from within the BIOS, else the installation will fail. To use AHCI with Windows XP, first you have to install XP in IDE mode, install the AHCI drivers, THEN switch the AHCI on in the BIOS.
Update: there’s a workaround posted in the comments section of this page, please scroll down to see it.
The next test was installing Windows Vista Ultimate. As the installer is much more advanced than the XP’s, i thought there will be no issue. Again, I was wrong: the computer halted when Vista tried to configure its software. The solution was again to switch the AHCI off, then the installation didn’t fail. But just for the sake of the fun, if you switch later AHCI on, Vista will not boot. At all. The only fix was coming from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base. If you read it, the whole thing is very logical and dumb in the same time.

The Li Ion batteries resisted 1 hour and 57 minutes when the notebook was used for typing this article and 54 minutes when I was viewing a HD video. I’d rate this performance as excellent for its class.

The WLAN device was working properly in any condition. It was able to connect to a desktop computer from almost 100 meters, but at this distance the drop of the transfer was considerable.

The price of the Acer eMachines E510 is $500 + VAT where I live. Generally, the performance was very good for office work and even for HD media display. In comparison with its price, I would say that it’s an awesome choice for business-men or bloggers who travel a lot. I’d recommend it for almost anyone.

Important Update: One of the comment authors, M!llu was kind enough to provide the XP drivers for the eMachines e510 notebook on an alternative download site, accessible for anyone, thanks to Rapidshare. You can find the download-links by clicking here. I checked all the files and couldn’t find any threat in them, not even false positive.

Update: If you’re sick of searching for XP drivers for the eMachines e510, the official support website of eMachines provided them here: http://support.emachines.com/em/driver/nb/e510.html. If you click the link, you will find both Vista and XP drivers, and additionally the users’ manual for the eMachines e510.