Home > Consumer Reviews > Acer Aspire 2920 Notebook Laptop, Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo T7300, 12.1" TFT, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hard-drive, DVD±RW, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, WiFi, Bluetooth, Integrated Webcam, Vista Home Premium

I have owned this laptop for about a month now and I am delighted with it. It offers excellent value for money for something this compact, with a powerful CPU and plenty of memory and disk space (although for some reason Acer decided to divide the disk into two equal-sized partitions - I would have preferred one large disk). The product does not come with recovery disks - instead you need to create your own when you first power it up. Make sure you have some writeable DVDs handy. This laptop is tough and well built, with a nice bright (though reflective) display. I have found it great for running office applications, playing music, displaying and processing photographs, surfing the Internet and playing DVDs. Its main weakness is its graphics card, so don't expect to play high speed games on it. It claims to deliver virtual surround sound, but the speakers are too tiny to be effective. Using headphones or adding some external speakers improves the sound quality. I have seen other reviews commenting on the appearance and the compactness of the keyboard, but I have had no problems (and I have large hands). I think the appearance is a matter of taste, and the grey plastic actually gives the laptop some strength and robustness. So in my opinion, a great buy.

I bought this laptop a week ago, and have been nothing but surprised... I bought it on the strength of the processor - a fast chip with Intel Virtualisation Technology built in. So this first thing I did was spend £60 upgrading the memory to 4Gb so I could run VMWare on it as well.

Next, I rebuilt the system to a single 250Gb partition and reinstalled my own copy of Vista (minus all the freebie rubbish it comes with). Vista + WindowsUpdate detected every single last component on the machine, and the only extras I have to manually install were the Acer Applications which I downloaded from their website without any hassle.

So far, using the machine has been a real pleasure. I dont find the keyboard a problem at all (and I am a life long Thinkpad user). In fact, Im finding my touchtyping has improved a little with this keyboard.

The main Con of this model is the Graphics card. It works fine (runs Aero in Vista), and gets a 3.5 vista score, but it is definately a Office GPU and not for anything taxing in the 3D department. I bought this notebook on a whim, and had I done more research, I would have gone for the model with the nVidia 8600M card instead. In fact, I might see if I can upgrade this one after-market.

The screen is very bright - which is needed because the surface is Gloss (why someone decided to make the screen glossy I'll never know). Resolution is perfect for this size screen, but could be a little small for people who's eyesight isnt the best. Top noth display could only be improved by a matt finish.

HD is fast, registering a 5.3 Vista score. I also use the SDCard slot for a 2Gb ReadyBoost Virtual Memory Cache, so along with the 4GB ram, I find the HD is only ever accessed for loading/saving and not for virtual memory - making access blazingly fast.

Battery life is good. Easily handling a full 2-hour DVD playback. When on battery saving mode, maybe 4 hours is achievable. I was going to buy a second battery but now I'm not sure I need to.

In summary, for an ultra-portable, it has everything built in, and plenty of power to run lots of software. I would expect to pay £800+ for this sort of laptop, not the £575 I paid at my local Comet!!! If there is a cost cutting that has been made - it could be in durability - but time will tell on that one. At this price, as long as it lasts a year or so, I will be extremely happy with this purchase. Possibly one of the best value laptops available today!!!

Hi guys.. I bought this machine after reading your reviews and my opinion is same.. its really great.. the best part is, I got it for only £500 from Comet.. So do chk for different deals before buying it.. U might save big amount...

I bought this machine about 6 months ago based on its spec and portability. I haven't been disappointed in this area. Very lightweight and easy to carry around. It also runs the most demanding applications including VMware with ease. I run XP Pro on mine so can't comment on Vista. It also looks really good - I get lots of comments from cute to trendy.
Had a problem with the display but that has been sorted (settings issue). Would upgrade to 4 star but can't!

Acer Aspire 2920 Notebook Laptop, Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo T7300, 12.1" TFT, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hard-drive, DVD±RW, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100, WiFi, Bluetooth, Integrated Webcam, Vista Home Premium - I have had this laptop for 3 months now. Initially I was very impressed. However, as I had increasing problems with Vista, I decided to downgrade it to Windows XP. As a result, I discovered that this laptop was designed only to run Vista. There are no English / US drivers for it and I has to download Chinese drivers to install on it. It took about 8 days to get it working again on Windows XP. I have also successfully dual booted it with Mandriva (Linux) 2009 which works better than Windows XP! Things got so bad that I have and am still seriously considering selling it on Ebay so, that I can buy a laptop that is compatible with Windows XP.

I am fairly IT Literate and this was a great struggle. I would strongly recommend against anyone buying this laptop if there is any chance that you may want to install Windows XP on it at a later date. Without Windows Vista, it is an expensive piece of junk.