Home > Consumer Reviews > Acer Aspire 2930 12-inch Laptop, Intel Core 2 Duo T5900, Vista Home Premium, 3GB RAM, 250GB HDD

This is a pretty decent, compact notebook. It's not very stylish looking or fancy but it performs well all around. I've had mine a few months now and finding a good review was hard before buying so I thought I'd leave my impressions here for others to see. This review was made after formatting the drive and putting Windows RC1 7 on, which runs extremely well on this notebook.

Performance:
This laptop suprised me with it's speed being so small I've yet to notice any kind of perfomance lag. Easily capable of HD 1080p video playback although the screen resolution is more suited to 720p. The dual core CPU gives it a nice edge when multitasking. I've even done some CPU intensive audio work with it and it's now become my scratchpad for music ideas with the freely available ASIO4ALL driver. Do not buy this laptop if you want to play any form of 3D games, the onboard 3D chip is useless. To give some idea: Trine on barest minimum settings was not really maintaining a playable frame rate. Vector based 2D game Plants vs Zombies ran exceptionally well though.

Screen:
Not great but not terrible either, it can go quite bright but at the high brightness there is some backlight bleed and at lower brightness settings the screen tends to veer towards very slightly yellow. Although quite a small screen it's fairly crisp and sharp so pretty comfortable to work on. Contrast isn't the greatest - I watch TV episodes on it and they are very very watchable - just don't expect the deepest blacks. Coating is quite reflective so be aware of that if you're going to use it in bright areas.

Build Quality:
The chassis is a little chunky depth wise but this gives the advantage of making the whole thing feel pretty solid. The palm rest and keyboard feel like they will support a fair amount of pressure. Touchpad works well although the buttons click quite loudly. Some small niggles, picking up the unit it's easy to press the eject button on the DVD drive. The volume control at the front is loose and can be accidentally adjusted by your clothing if you have it on your lap. The unit does get warm but not overly so, by comparison my brother's more expensive and powerful Dell Studio XPS 13 gets very very hot at the back.

Battery:
Isn't great giving maybe 2-3 hours max usage if you aren't doing anything heavy. Better batteries maybe available though I haven't looked. I haven't tested it's battery duration while not in use.

Extras:
The webcam isn't bad but the drivers for it are. I haven't been able to locate any better ones so currently I'm stuck adjusting the settings for each new environment or light level I use it in. Built in mic works fine though. Speakers are pathetic as I expected from a laptop this size. There is no bass whatsoever and when you unpack it may as well put the included earphones in the bin too. Get a decent set of headphones/desktop speakers/earphones and you'll be rewarded with nice sound quality as is common with most on-board sound these days. The extra keys I don't use however there's another issue here... The wireless lan button is hardwired and can quite easily be pressed accidentally thus terminating your connection, and during connection it constantly blinks with an orange light which while annoying at first I've since become completely used to it's distraction and it no longer bothers me at all.

Please note: I was previously unaware before I bought but it appears this model (the UK version at least) does NOT have built in bluetooth - can be easily rectified with a cheap usb dongle though.

So to summarize...
The good:
Nice CPU performance
Very portable
Sturdy build but reasonably light
Screen can go very bright

The bad:
Some questionable design decisions such as wireless button
Very poor speaker quality even though soundcard is decent
Screen viewing angles could be better (seen much worse though)

Overall I rated this notebook 4 stars. Good value for money for a compact 12" laptop and way better performance than any netbook.

Brought this after my £1699 sony only lasted 18 months. It's small, fast and looks great. I'll always stick to slightly cheaper laptops from now on. If this one lasts 18 months I'll be over the moon