Acer Laptops - Recent impressions
 

I run into these now and then but haven't bought their product for years. They had their main US assembly/support depot near us in San Clara CA. The headaches they caused were large both in quality of product and solving problems. That was ~8yrs ago. Times change and I try not to hold grudges.

Current day: A niece is looking at one of their laptops for her Christmas present. (several of us chipping in.) Her needs fell prey to creep and she's now stuck on a Turion MT-34 model. Nice specs for the money but I haven't touched it. I can help with narrowing down options. What I'm looking for is experience the last couple years with their build quality and support.

For the curious it's a 5002WLMI. Turion MT-34 (~2GHz Pentium M-ish), 15" WXGA, 100GB, 512MB, DVD+/-RW, 802.11g, 6lbs. I'd be looking for something lighter but this will be mostly a desktop replacement. She's not much of a gamer so the integrated graphics aren't a problem. We'll be bumping the RAM to 1GB whatever the model.

Thanks for any perspective.

Nothing at all? Be that way. :)

We picked it up. Nice thin case. Bright 1280x800 screen. The hard drive is overkill. Of course the ad was wrong. It has the Turion ML-30 processor instead of the advertised MT-34. Essentially a 35W socket 754 Athlon 64 at 1.6GHz vs. the MT's 25W at 1.8GHz. Disappointing, but not the end of the world. Staples was good enough to throw in an extra 512MB. Not a bad system for $750.

Good luck with it.

That's encouraging. :lol:

I'm crossing my fingers. If something goes south I know who becomes the friendly equipment loaner. :hmm:

I have one at home that my wife and son use... it's fairly dependable. The one thing I don't like about it is that the hinge for the monitor isn't firm... other than that... it's fine.

What I meant was to wish you good luck :-)

She brought it over for help today. Turned out to be simple stuff but I sense a trend. :)

I took the opportunity to run one of my quick XviD encoding benchmarks against some old results:

System/Minutes:seconds
-----------------------------
Desktop AMD A64 754 3000 (@ 2000MHz)/2:23
Desktop AMD XP 2500 (@ 1833MHz)/3:00
Acer 5002 Turion ML-30 (@ 1600MHz)/3:08
Laptop HP ze5170 P4 2GHz (@ 2000MHz)/4:07

Not exactly blazing but enough for Office.

Picked up an HP dv1410 for myself. (Made by Quanta) I think they're near end-of-life but it's cheap enough I won't be paranoid. This vs. waiting for another good deal on a Dell 700m.

Celeron M 1.6GHz, 512MB, 80GB, wide format 14" WXGA 1280x768, WiFi, FireWire, SVideo out, 8xDVD RW, 6way Card Reader, Remote control hides in PCMCIA slot, lots of player controls, etc. 5.2lbs $799. Looks like a miniature 2000 series with video stuff.

Same XviD encode benchmark
--------------------------------
Dell 700/710m (by Wistron) Pentium M (@1.6)/2:42
HP ze2315 (by Quanta) Sempron 3000 (@1.8)/2:44
Compaq v2405 (by ?) Sempron 3000 (@1.8)/2:48
HP dv1410 (by Quanta) Celeron M 380 (@1.6)/2:56
Toshiba M45-S169 (by ATi & Uli) Celeron M 380 (@1.6)/3:21 (same on two units)