Acer Aspire 15.0" AMD Turion 64 ML-30 512MB Memory DDR333 Windows XP Professional LX.A5106.001

Pros: None

Cons: None

Overall Review: I ordered this a a trial to see if it would work for our hospital. It's 64 bit processor, disk space and memory were all in our spec range, but its price was way below what I was expecting. I've put this one through its paces all weekend, and have been quite pleased with everything, once I reloaded Windows on it in the way we use it at the hispital. Although the machine came with Windows XP Pro preinstalled, Acer distributes the system arrived with the hard drive divided into two 40GB partitions (which I understand the reason for but don't care for myself), and had both partitions formatted as FAT32 drives instead of NTFS (which made little sense until I played with the restore utility, which is a Win 98 application that doesn't understand NTFS). Serious users will want to reformat the system with a regular XP Pro CD and then use the system disk that comes with the machine to load the drivers. After doing this, I was able to bring up a database server (MySQL), IIS, Delphi and Mono, and the system worked flawlessly and pleasantly fast. The wireless connectiity is great - it worked well anywhere on the property, right up to around 400 feet from the closest AP. It also seamlessly picked up connection to the public Internet at the restaurant where I went to lunch. Very fast, reaonably cool, comfortable keyboard, interesting touch pad (although I will always prefer my mini USB mouse), sat literally on my lap for 2.5 hours on battery with no problems. Great buy. John Johansen, Information Services Coordinator, Ojai Valley Community Hospital.

Pros: Looks pretty... Easy to use... No dead pixels, nice software for Windows, but no recovery disk. Newegg got it to me on time before Christmas.

Cons: It came without the Norton Antivirus OEM; I had to buy my own.
I had just turned on, or rebooted my Acer Laptop when this message came up immediately. “This system has recovered from a serious error.” Got the death notice from Microsoft notifying me, “Unspecified error!”, and a box below it with an “Ok” inside. The only way I could stop the constant stream of small windows was to task the Windows Task Manager (Control, Alt, Delete) where I found the CPU was quite busy. It blamed an overheated CPU, bad Memory sticks, and the overheating.

Overall Review: It has an AMD Turion 64 Mobile MT30 Lancaster 800MHz FSB 1MB L2 Cache Socket 754 Processor. This processor is noted to run cool. When its fan takes off running, it blows unusually hot air out the side. This laptop needs a Seagate (Cool) 5400 instead of that bottleneck 4200rpm hard drive and it needs more ram in order to accomplish multitasking simple web pages and Word Documents. the restore utility is a joke.