Value (inclusive of problem) for Money !!. Review on Acer Aspire 3002NLC

I have been using this laptop for 2 years now. I bought this laptop while I joined my MBA. At that time, I didnt want to spend big bucks, but being a computer freak I did not want to compromise on any specifications. I was surely looking for a laptop that offered me a good run for my money. I zeroed in on this and one compaq model with the same specifications except that it ran on a celeron processor. I had experienced celeron on my desktop and did not want to commit a mistake again as I use my system for some high end multimedia applications like video, image editing and celeron was really a drag on the system.

AMD is a 64-bit processor and offers better speed and performance and I decided to going in for it over the compaq which was priced at the same Rs.34K for a celeron. Acer also looked sleek and cool and the person at the showroom told me that it would cost Rs.33.8K. He also said that he would install a windows XP as the Acer does not come preloaded with one.

After I decided to go for the Acer lappie, I had to go to a different showroom coz of the fact that the showroom I visited initially was closed that day and I had to leave for my MBA that day. As luck would have had it, the showroom person here told that Windows XP would be installed at a cost of Rs.500 which wouldnt be shown in the invoice. With no options and the time crunch, I had to succumb. After I confirmed that I will take that model, the showroom personnel sent a representative to his stock-keeping place to get the laptop.He says they just maintain one display piece of the each model of the laptop. After a long wait of 1.5 hours, the rep returned with the laptop and another painful 45mins passed for installing XP.I told him I will install all the applications myself.

The first thing I noticed wth the laptop was a disastarous battery life of 35mins. I kicked myself for not verifying it at the showroom and taking the dealers word of 2 hours for it. Anyways, it did not matter much as I did not intend to use it during travel but it was just meant to make up the need for a system for 2 years.

There were around 20 people in the hostel who bought the same laptop for the same reasons as me. The laptop worked fine for 6months after which by coincidence or whatever almost 90% of the laptops developed a speaker problem and it had to be replaced. Replacement was an ongoing process and the replaced speakers werent really fine and persistently gave problems. The people at the Acer service centres were always ready to replace any part that had problems. I had some of my friends replace the CD-DVD Combo, battery and even the Hard disk.

I have knack of running into problems more than once. As if luck would have had it, a week after the one year warranty period, my laptop developed several problems. The DVD Combo was very selective in its choice of which CDs/DVDs to read! The LCD developed a long black line running thru the entire length of the diagonal and to make the situation worse, the battery life reduced to a mere 10 mins(Even a desktop UPS would have given me more back-up time).

This time around I had company with a majority of my friends laptops too having some snags especially with the CD-DVD Combo and the battery. Eventhough the warranty had expired, the service center could have considered the fact that such problems are universal in all its laptops.But money was more important and they refused to entertain even the mass request.

I wouldnt like to copy-paste any techical specifications from the site but I will put down some of my observations.

The processor is really good and I have run the laptop for 2 days continuously and did not observe any abnormal heating issue. With an integrated display adapter and a shared memory of 64MB out of the 256MB, this takes on even high end multimedia applications with ease with parallel processes runnning. Multi-tasking even with resource intensive applications seems a breeze.

The main issue with the shared memory was that applications that require 256MB RAM(almost all applications now) to install would throw up an insufficient memory response on preliminary system scanning and fail to install.

It is Wi-fi compliant and hence there is provision to add a Wi-Fi card later. This isnt really a deal as now Wi-Fi adapters come with a USB interace(just like a pen drive).

The audio quality of the speakers is bad and unclear.

The compaq with the celeron was more sturdy and reportedly none of my friends who had that visited any service center in the 2 years.

This is a high performance, value for money laptop that with some proper service could capture the entry level laptop market.