Acer Aspire AS4530-6823 NoteBook AMD Athlon X2 QL-62(2.00GHz) 14.1" Wide XGA 3GB Memory DDR2 667 320GB HDD DVD Super Multi NVIDIA GeForce 9100M G - Retail

Reviewed By: on 5/1/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 day to 1 week

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Blazing fast CPU, more than enough memory, very decent graphics and a nice hard drive. Draft-N wireless! Light, soft keyboard. A perfect notebook for all average/above-average users. The Geforce 9100 is a nice addition. You can run CUDA/PhysX enabled applications on it and most games run pretty decently on it.

Cons: Tons of unwanted software. I personally don't care about it since I got rid of Vista and installed Win XP/Ubuntu on it.

Other Thoughts: I know I can't ask much more of it for the price, but bluetooth would be a sweet addition to it.

If you're unsure, go ahead and take this notebook. I bought 3 of those, one for me, my girlfriend and my sister. They all loved it as well.

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Excellent value for money

Reviewed By: Guybrush on 5/1/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: For $500, excellent deal. Similar config with Dell or HP goes upto $700. Laptop works great, delivered in 3 days flat by UPS. Sound is quite loud in built-in speakers. Display is clear and comforting to the eyes. I actually read ebooks on it. Weight is very much bearable and not a burden like some other laptops. Works very well with Vista except for a little lag which I attribute to all the nonsense apps Acer installed by default. Absolutely no lag with Ubuntu 9.04.

Cons: Absolute garbage software installed by Acer. A whole lot of trash utilities sitting in the system tray, running background services etc.
Recovery partition takes 13GB of the HDD.
Under normal usage i.e. video, music etc, battery lasts a little over an hour and a half and not reallly 3 hours as mentioned.

Other Thoughts: Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) has incredible support for this one. The wifi and webcam work out of the box. You would need a little tweaking to get the mic and headphones port to work, but it's not difficult. Best part is, Ubuntu comes with Wubi which installs ubuntu like any other windows application, but which works out of Windows.

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Hot Price/Deal, Hot Hard drive literarly!

Reviewed By: Forrest on 7/28/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Its small, light. Powerfull CPU+GPU. Decent size RAM and good amount of hard drive space.

Cons: After running it playing games, then feeling each spot on the back of the laptop then taking off the back panel to take a look. I have come to the conclusion as to why its so hot.

The hottest spot of all is the hard drive, the way the fan is set up, it will blow air from inside the laptop sucking from the hard drive area onto the cpus heat sink thus not cooling the heat sink at all but washing extremly hot air onto the heatsink.

DONT TRY THIS IF NOT EXPERT
My solution is going to be simple, i am going to make my own custom vents directly under the hard drive with a drill. So its going to have multiple holes so heat can soak out at a faster rate, at its current set up the plastic panel is just soaking up the heat and acting as a sweater with no real venting besides the cpu heat sink sucking up its hot air.

I could be wrong but i believe the CPU and GPU are connected to the same heatsink via a copper heat pipe, so both sort of run hot due to the hard drives abnormal temp

Other Thoughts: Some say the fan is really loud. On mine the fan is so quiet i cant hear it, i suspect thats a bad thing due to when the bio reconizes the heat level is unacceptable it kicks the fan into higher gear which makes more noise.

Mine on the other hand does not do this, i would have been okay with more noise.

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Great value, works fine with Ubuntu

Reviewed By: Netlurker on 7/21/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Good value, well-supported in Ubuntu, much more solid feel than my old Acer (Aspire 3100.)

Cons: Small screen, but I chose the trade-off of weight vs. size.

Other Thoughts: Very pleased with hardware support in Ubuntu (setup for dual boot.) Wireless and media card reader work out of the box in 9.04. The "restricted" driver from NVidia will be offered after first software update and 3D acceleration works great with it. I haven't tried the headphone or line-in jacks, someone mentioned there might be some work needed there.

This is a pretty fast machine especially in comparison to my old Sempron-based system. Drive is a good speed too, important to me since I encrypt my partitions which adds some overhead.

All in all, recommended for someone looking for a relatively small and fast system at a good price.

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Love Hate Relationship Leaning Towards Love

Reviewed By: remmie on 7/21/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Specs are outstanding for a low-cost, all purpose laptop. I am an AMD and nVidia fan, and though this isn't a gaming laptop, the graphics have 256MB dedicated (much more shared of course) and nice sftw that beats the heck out of the cruddy Intel GMA graphics in so many low-cost laptops. Generous 320GB, 3GB RAM, EXCELLENT feeling keyboard with slight dips in the key caps which keep fingers from slipping off towards the neighboring keys for non-touch typists like me. LOVE the size of this laptop - I went from a 15.4 and was afraid I would miss the real-estate, but I don't even notice the diff and the machine is lighter and easier to use overall and just feels BETTER. Built-in webcam and mic, and apparent support for wifi N (on G and haven't tried that). Nice case and I like that the interior is not glossy because it doesn't gather oily fingerprints. A near-perfect machine with 2 (maybe 3) caveats... but they're significant enough to cost it an egg.

Cons: FAN NOISE FAN NOISE FAN NOISE!! This machine almost never runs without a fan going unless you sit and read a webpage and don't touch anything. And while the lowest speed is fairly quiet, the succeeding speeds are much louder, with the highest speed the loudest fan I have ever heard in any laptop I have ever used. Annoyingly loud. And it doesn't take much to get it there and keep it there. I was DL'ing OS upgrades and the fan stayed on at its loudest the entire time. It was so annoying I considered selling it. I am looking into undervolting and might also try to find a different, quieter better made fan, if anyone makes one. Also the TOUCHPAD is unusually LONG so it takes several swipes of the finger to get the cursor across the screen! I wish it had a calibration adjustment to compensate. The Symantecs settings don't to it. Finally, I am not sure this wifi card supports N even though it was advertised as such. I have G but Device Mgr doesn't show it as having N capability.

Other Thoughts: The front of this machine comes to a sharp angle making it uncomfortable to rest your wrists against. I roll up a towel to rest my wrists on. But the things I love about the machine (keyboard, nVidia, size, weight, case, features) make me want to find solutions to the rest. Some things I will just get used to, but the fan problem needs to be fixed. I won't live with that noise all the time. Also, the machine has vents on the bottom where it draws up cool air into the case, then shoots it out the back vents. So you can't place this laptop directly on your lap or a pillow.... it needs to sit on a hard surface. I place a coffee tray on my lap with a pillow under that. For what I paid $449 + tax and a free Win7 upgrade, I'll be happy when I fix the fan issue! I have a Tosh L305-S5933 & you can't hear the fan EVER! Vista probably makes this mach run hotter than XP would, but I'm waiting on Win7 to dump Vista or I woulda loaded XP. Anyway, aside from the fan it's nearly perfect.

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