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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Worth the Money

Reviewed By: Lordmat on 12/28/2009

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

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: The specs for this laptop are top notch when considering the price. I've had it for just under a week so far and it has performed surprising well at everything I've tested.

Cons: The only 'con' that I've come across has been mentioned ad nauseum. The bloatware. It wasn't quite as irritating to me, but if I had purchased this and given it to my girlfriend prior to removing all the unnecessary garbage then it would have become a headache. I don't see that this merits me removing an egg for the review though. Seems like a lazy reason.

Other Thoughts: This was a replacement laptop for an old Dell and for the price (Plus free shipping, thanks Newegg) I still spent less then my girlfriend spent on her original. Not too mention that the specs on this laptop are close to double what she has been using.

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Excellent

Reviewed By: Anonymous on 12/24/2009

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

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Lightweight, Nice Black layout, Vibrant screen, Decent dual processor, good integrated graphics, very nice speakers and best of all you get these great features for an affordable price. Worth 600-700 dollars easily

Cons: none as of yet, fan can get a little loud but its not even noticeable when you get used to it.

Other Thoughts: pick one of these up you wont be dissapointed

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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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