eMachines d620 – A review and deja vu

We have tested and reviewed a half a dozen eMachines notebooks. Reviewing the eMD620 by eMachines was much like a deja vu: it is exactly the same as the eMachines e620 from the inside, but looks a bit differently from the outside.
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Acer eMachines e620: Cheap is not bad

Where I live, when you buy something cheap almost always means that you get something which is not good. The eMachines series of Acer seems to fight against this rule: they are cheap, but extremely reliable and their performance is outstanding in their class.

I got this time an Acer eMachines e620 which I could test for a whole weekend and arrived to the conclusion, based on my previous reviews of the e510 and e520, that this notebook is one of the best notebooks I tested in eMachines bargain notebook category.
As always the tests I made a real-life tests, not benchmarks. My opinion about benchmarks is that they good for memory, processors and hard disks, but how a whole system performs can’t really be measured with benchmarking software but with real-life, real production-software tests.

Acer eMachines e620: Visually pleasing

Even though the notebook’s case is plastic, it looks beautiful. The black plastic is mixed with a thin white plastic stripe which confers the notebook a specific personality. The finish of the e620 is high quality and the silver/aluminum finish of the inscriptions only increases the notebook’s beauty.
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 notebook has dual-output support, thus it can be used for presentations by linking a projector to it while watching what you do on its own display.
The arrangement of the buttons is very well thought. The keyboard is standard 88\89 keys input device, the numeric keypad can be accessed by simultaneously pressing the “Fn” key and the number’s specific key. The touchpad worked perfectly even when it was dusty or even when it was wet. The eMachines e620 has three buttons below the touchpad which works similarly to a 3-button mouse’s.

The eMachines e620 and multimeda processing

The eM-e620 came with Windows Vista Home Premium already installed. Since Vista uses more memory than XP the common mind would have dictate that a HD video will lag during play. I was wrong.
The first test was watching a HD movie (720p). 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, less F.E.A.R. which was a slightly slow in high detail mode, but still playable.

Even though it sounds weird that the above games works well on the e620, the unexpected performance is understandable when you know the notebook’s specifications.

eMachines e620: Technical Specifications

• Processor: AMD AM2 Athlon 2650e processor, working at 1.6GHz under full load, 800MHz front side bus and 512KB L2 cache
• RAM: 2GB DDRII RAM working at 667MHz, upgradeable up to 4GB
• Graphics: ATI Radeon™ Xpress 1200

eM-e620 and Operating systems

As I said before, the eMachines e620 came with Windows Vista Home Premium already installed. 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 e620’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 or on the hardware manufacturer’s website.

Last thoughts on eMachine e620

The notebook comes shipped with a 44.4 W 4400 mAh 6-cell Li-ion battery which under full load lasts less than an hour. If you leave in peace the notebook, the batteries will last for about 2 and a half hours.
The notebook’s price is $450 + VAT where I live, that makes its price quite acceptable. Other than the short battery life I can’t complain about anything. If you are not a traveler type person, probably this notebook will fit your needs.

Acer eMachines drivers (XP & Vista)

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

Intel Celeron 575 benchmarks and comparision

This post was requested by Alexander.

This series of the Intel Celeron family were designed to be cheap, but in the same time to have acceptable performance as well. The Celeron 575 has 1 megabyte of level 2 cache, and a 667 MHz front side bus. Under maximum load this processor will work at 2 GHz. It is not a recommended processor for overclocking; while it works well with office applications, the games which needs a lot of computing power will lag.

I used 3 types of benchmarking for this processor: SuperPi 1M and 2M, 3DMark06 and Cinebench (simple). The configuration of the system which the benchmark was made on is the following:

• Motherborad: AOpen i965GMt-LA, Socket P
• Memory (RAM): 2 GB of DDRII memory working at 667MHz, manufactured by Kingmax
• Hard Disk: WD Scorpio® Black™ 320 GB, 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM
• Graphics: Integrated Intel X3100

Note, that the results are only informative.

Benchmark results of the Intel Celeron 575

On the above system the Celeron 575 calculated 1 million digits after the decimal point of the PI number in 24 seconds while calculating 2 million digits took 54 seconds.
In 3DMark06 CPU test the processor achieved 917 points, which in my opinion is quite good for a Celeron.
CineBench R10 on the other hand was not so generous; in the rendering test of CineBench R10 the Celeron 575 achieved only 1914 points.

Benchmark comparison: Celeron 530, Celeron 540, Celeron 575

The comparison was effectuated by changing the processor of the system. Nothing else was changed.
These results are informative, unofficial and should be used only as informative data.

Sony VAIO NS105N now cheaper, thanks to Obama

And this is not a joke. OnSale, one of our sponsors released an Inauguration Program and dozens of notebooks now cost way cheaper than usual. The Sony VAIO NS105N normally costs $727.99, now is $579. That’s almost $150 off!

Review of the Sony VAIO NS105N/S notebook:
We tested this notebook for three days and we can’t say a bad word about it. As always the Vaio’s, this VAIO is beautiful as well. The 15.4″ WXGA display is easy to read in any condition, even in very bright environment.

The processor of the Sony VAIO NS105N/S is an Intel Core 2 Duo T5870, working at 2.0GHz under maximum load. Worthless to say that office applications run like a charm, thanks to the high performance processor and the 1 Gig PC5300 RAM.

The graphic card is an Intel GMA 4500MHD. This means for the end-user of the Sony VAIO NS105N/S that graphic applications will perform well on the notebook. We’ve tested the Sony VAOI NS105N/S with 3 games as usual: FEAR, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and World of Warcraft. Playing each game was a pleasure on this notebook, even when the graphics details was set to medium. Purchasing more RAM is recommended though, for playing with high quality details.

The Sony VAIO NS105N/S can be also used for playing HD movies. We tested it with movies up to 720p and the play was smooth enough to be enjoyable.

The 6 cell Lithium Ion batteries lasted under maximum load for about 2 hours, this changed however to 7(!) hours when the Sony VAIO NS105N/S was used for office work.

The notebook comes with pre-installed Windows Vista Home Premium, which, worthless to say that runs smoothly on the notebook. If you want to buy this notebook, you might want to know that we also tested the Sony VAIO NS105N/S with Windows XP and Windows 7 beta as well. None of them had an issue and switching between different operating systems was easy enough as all the drivers are provided on the manufacturer’s website.

As a final note, we wrote this review because we believe that these kind of deals pops up only a few times a year. The Sony Vaoi NS105N/S is an excellent notebook for anyone, even for gaming.

Follow this link to read more and eventually buy the Sony Vaio NS105N/S:
$149 OFF! Sony VAIO Intel Core 2 Duo T5870 2.0GHz Notebook – Granite Silver NOW only $579 (was $727.99)

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.

Review – My own Google Laptop Backpack

Since I bought a notebook I had hard times when I had to travel: where to put my notebook when I travel? I can’t put it in the luggage for the obvious reason that I can’t work with the notebook while traveling. I can’t hold it in my hand because where I live rains a lot and notebooks doesn’t like rain. I can’t put it in the briefcase cos then I have no space for the documents I usually travel with.
I needed a laptop bag. OK, but laptop backpack or a traditional briefcase-like laptop bag?

If I choose a laptop bag, then I have both of my hands occupied: in right the briefcase as always, in the other the laptop bag. This made me to choose the laptop backpack!

Probably you noticed already from my previous posts that I’m one of those who are fan of the infamous Google. This is why I chose to get a Google Laptop Backpack.

The Google Laptop Backpack costs in Europe $54.82 (USD) plus VAT. Since the weight of the laptop backpack is far from light, there were only two choices for shipment: UPS express or UPS standard delivery. One thing I adore in UPS is that you can track the package on its road, so you know when to expect it. Since UPS don’t has offices in my country yet, after the Google Laptop Backpack arrived in my country, they handed the package to DHL and they delivered the package to my front door. On time! UPS informed me that the package will arrive to me in seven days, and in my front door between 9 AM and 7 PM. So it happened: DHL rang at my front door at exactly 5 PM, on the seventh day after the laptop backpack from Google was shipped in the UK.

Now about the Google laptop backpack. Its design is kinda weird, but probably it’s just me. Seemingly it’s made 100% of polyester which is odd, since Google is probably one of the greatest supporters of the Green Initiatives. But at least it’s waterproof. On the bottom of the Google laptop backpack there’s a thick rubber layer which will come handy when I will drop it in the snow of the Alps.

The backpack has 4 pockets: 2 big in which you can easily put your laptop in (they are huge) and 2 smaller, perfect for the cables, mouse, keyboard and the charger, notebooks and pens. In one of the smaller pockets there’s a hidden(-ish) pocket which can be perfect for hiding stuff from your girlfriend and wife’s sight.
The backpack itself is around 2lbs (~1 kilogram), which is not much if you consider the rubber from the backpack’s and the consolidation of the pockets. The zippers are massive enough to not remain in your hands when you open and close the Google laptop backpack, which is good again since I usually break every zipper I encounter.

Am I satisfied so far with my brand new Google laptop backpack? If I take in consideration that the Google-store employees were extremely helpful, the shipment arrived on time to me, the backpack looks cool (and weird in the same time), the shell is tough and waterproof, I think I’m satisfied with it. So far. Will see when I manage to break the zippers.

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.

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.

This post has been automatically translated in the following languages: Croatian, French, German, Italian, Polish and Romanian