Acer Aspire AS9304, AMD Turion TL 56, 17" TFT with Acer CrystalBrite screen, 2048MB Memory, 160GB Hard Disk Drive, DVD Super-Multi, Nvidia GeForce GO 6100Graphics, WiFi, 5 in 1 Card Reader, Acer OrbiCam 0.3MP, Windows Vista Premium

Amazon Customer Reviews

(5 out of 5)

Excellent mid-range dual core Vista laptop

Great to have a large bright WXGA glass screen at last, these really do make a difference to your viewing pleasure over the standard TFT's. Great for movies, text is clear and colours are rich. This is a big machine and fairly hefty with the battery installed.

Talking of batteries this battery is charged to 80% in the first hour and fully charged (not in use) in 2 hours. Using it while online I get 1 hour 50 minuutes before I have to recharge. The reviewer below is incorrect when saying you have to charge it all day and that the battery lasts less than an hour, he may have had a faulty machine.

This machine does come with 2 Gigs of RAM! I think the reviewer below may have bought the 9300 with 1Gb and posted under the wrong item, not sure. Having said that the Vista startup is noticeably slower than a typical XP startup. This may be because it is loading so may background programs which are not necessary including the Acer eEmpowerment software. Getting rid of some of the bloatware installed by default will make the startup faster as will turning off some of the fancy Vista graphical effects.

The Vista setup is painless if a little slow. It recognised my home network straight away, but I had trouble finding where to add my WORKGROUP name and then I had to add the MAC address of the laptop onto the routers "allowed devices" list before internet capability was fully operable. Just finding things you were used to in XP is a bit of a challenge at first with Vista as function names have changed, as have their locations. Vista also constantly asks you if you meant to change a setting, which can be a pain. Still, two days on and I am quite liking Vista now. I got the free 90 day trial of Norton Security installed (will dump it after the trial) and then updated Vista via Windows Update - 32 updates required - and it all went smoothly.

The keyboard is large and has a nice responsive feel. Plenty of USB2 sockets. Would have liked to see a firewire socket, but that can easily be added via a card.

Sound is excellent and clear, more than enough for playing movies and sounds good in headphones too.

You do need to cut a recovery disk quickly in case something goes wrong with the system, but that is easily done with the Acer recovery disk tool.

A bit odd splitting the disk in two with a data and system partition of roughly 69 Gb each (after Vista install). I would have preferred one partition.

This won't run the latest demanding games, but anything over a year to two years old should run fine on max settings.

Overall I have no complaints, it does what it is supposed to and does it well. It is good value for money, well constructed, and looks good too. Cannot fault it, so it gets a 5 from me.

(2 out of 5)

Unstable Vista Laptop

OK, Amazon ordering was fine as usual and fast.
Delivery - odd - for a high value laptop to leave it on the doorstep with no recipient signature - well!
As for the hardware - keyboard is nice and smooth unlike some, the hard disk is partitioned and they cram the OS into half the disk and don't modify the data location links to use the 2nd disk partition, pity. There are no image CD's - you have to cut these yourself - do it quickly!!!
The battery does not last long when surfing and a WP page was open - it ran out within 1 hour and yes - that was after a full day harging.
It ran smoothly for the first two days, then started hanging and freezing, only a cold reboot recovered the system, it is unclear as yet if it's the hardware or the 32 bit Vista Home Premium. I suspect that this laptop really needs 2gb ram minimum for Vista to run well and will certainly be trying out Ubuntu on here for a stable platform.
Other comments of it being a warmed up XP seem very appropriate - it strikes me that I have just spent lots of money on a new Graphical User Interface and not a lot else.
There are no parallel or serial ports - so be warned - all you with older printers, you may as well buy a network print server at the same time or a new printer.
Sound is OK, but actually not as good as my old Compaq Presario 700 which is saying something, but it does have an SPDIF port on the front of the laptop, and the facility for WIFI projection display driving, though goodness knows how Vista will cope...

DVD drive can be a bit noisy and is disconcerting at first - sounded more like it was scratching the CD, but it settles down eventually.

The backup software on the EAcer support will allow a full system image creation and incremental reminders, these you can then cut to CD.

That's about all for now...

MND

(5 out of 5)

Superb

Just received this last night and am absolutely delighted with it, please note however the "box contents" in the item description is slightly incorrect, in that it does not come with a recovery CD you're required to create these yourself using the Acer utilities.

Starting with the best bits first, the 17" screen is bright, clear and crisp and the nVidia graphics do an excellent job of coping with the 1440x900 resolution. Won't be trying any games from the last couple of years on this but older stuff should be fine. Given the size the screen doesn't appear to flex excessively and the hinge keeps the screen firmly in place at pretty much every angle. Also since Vista comes installed the 2GB RAM is a welcome addition. Since you also gain the extra screen real-estate with 17"'s it's also nice to see that the keyboard is pretty much full size with the numerical keypad present on the right. Additionally the keyboard surround isn't littered with lots of shortcut keys which seems to be common these days and I'm not personally a fan of. Instead there's a wifi, bluetooth (not installed) and three shortcut buttons.

Whilst there had to be compromises for this price, I consider them to be relatively minor. Firstly the CPU isn't the latest power efficient Intel Core 2, it's an older AMD Turion dual core and it copes surprisingly well. The system never appears sluggish, even with multiple applications running, although I'd changed the power profile to "High Performance" since I'm going to be keeping it plugged into the mains.
The second issue is build quality, some of the materials used for the construction (mainly plastics) can feel a little third rate and also the mouse buttons for the touchpad definitely feel cheap and have a rather nasty click to them.

My initial requirements when looking for a sub-£500 laptop were for it to have dual core processor, 2GB RAM and a 17" screen, plus all the other standard bits. I didn't honestly believe I'd be able to find this spec, but to not only find it but to come in under budget is truly amazing. Compromises aside for this price I don't believe you could do better for a budget laptop, so long as you don't mind it being "this seasons colour".

(5 out of 5)

excellent unit

After previously owning a MEDION unit the differences in simple build quality is astounding.

The keyboard is solid yet responsive, the machine itself although a little heavy is well designed and attractive. The indicators for wireless and hardrive are again very clear and overal the unit looks very high end.

The screen is brilliant, crystal clear and very good for DVD playback.

After unpacking the machine and booting it for the first time I was amazed with how much quicker the machine ran than my old dual core MEDION. Even though the processor was the same the extra 1gb of ram really makes all the difference for runnign your machine.

In power saver mode Im getting about 2 hrs (approx) before recharging and even when online thts doesnt drop much.

My last machine was a nightmare to set up with wireless. I am fairly new to PC owning and generally have had somebody else to help me with things. But try as I might I simply couldnt get anything to work. Ended up with a wireless router connected with a standard cable :-(

However the ACER connection wizard is amazing! Literally within minutes of clicking the on screen button it had set up all of my wireless connections with ease. It even automatically differentiates between work and home with no issues at all.

In short brilliant, throughly reccomended and a very very happy customer.

Just a shame the price has gone back up!!

(5 out of 5)

Excellent non-gamer laptop

This is an excellent laptop for new and experienced users who want Internet access and be able to do general work. It is not a gaming machine; with this in mind it has a very high specification. The dual-core processors make fast work out of anything that is thrown at them, the 2GB memory ensures the computer does not slow down when you have (for e.g.) Internet Explorer, Word, Outlook, Norton Internet Security, etc running all at the same time.
The 17" monitor has a very clear display and the keyboard with extra number pad on the far right provides an extra level of ease of use when typing etc. It has 4 USB ports that really are enough for the average user. All home-user hardware these days connects via USB making this very compatible.
It also has an s-video output that makes it very easy to copy the screen to a TV with Acer's GridVista software.
The battery life is pretty typical of all laptops; I managed to watch an hour and a bit of a movie on full volume before it ran out. The question is - how many of you are going to buy a laptop as it is small and easy to tidy away and then just use it in the house?
The internal wireless card supports both WEP and WPA encryption which all home-wireless-routers are compatible with and Vista has some very useful built in tools to help set up network `profiles'.
Windows Vista is installed (and is slowly becoming the standard) and may take a little while to become familiar with some of the changes; it is however a far superior operating system. It does require extra resources, but the machines hardware copes with no problem. Vista is far more secure than any of its predecessors and is ready for the next generation of computing with its 64-bit architecture based on XML.
It comes with Norton Internet Security which is a very powerful anti-virus and firewall, once again the dual-core processors find it no trouble; and it also comes with Microsoft Office 2007 (both are limited trials).