A product worth buying!. Review on Acer Aspire 4520

I own a laptop computer - Acer aspire4520, now 1.5 years old and now being an MS member I thought I would give a review on it. I bought it in OCT 2007 at the MRP of Rs.30500. It is powered by an AMD Athlon X2 processor with a clock speed of 1.8 GHz. It comes with a 1 GB RAM and can support upto 4 GB.I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and the now the total purchase price was Rs.32000.

According to my knowledge(please correct me if I’m wrong) all these computer systems irrespective of the brand -whether it is Sony/HP/Acer/Dell, all of them have components coming from very few vendors. E.g. Processors come from Intel or AMD, motherboard from Intel or Asus, RAM from Sandisk or Transcend and so on. So it is in turn the quality norms of these companies which decide the performance of our product and not the brand as such. So I decided to go for the brand which is most price worthy- less price and more utility; I chose Acer.

Quality and durability

Initially I was a bit hesitant to buy an AMD processor because of the fact that it was very cheap when compared to the Intel processors(almost half the price of Pentium) and I was speculating that there could be some quality issues when compared to Pentiums. Later I learnt that AMD processors were 64 bit processors and Intel Pentium processors were 32 bit processors. Then I decided to go for AMD as I could run 64 bit operating systems like Mac OS on my lappy(Pentium cannot run Mac 64 bit OS without Intel 64 bit BIOS architecture). I have used the system for quite some time and now I can assure you that AMD systems are as good as Intel or may be even better. The system is built tough though it looks like a toy - curved edges and bright coloured keypad. I have been using it mainly for surfing the net, gaming, watching movies and listening to songs. I have kept it switched on for long periods, overnight for downloading from the net – no worries yet. The battery backup is 1 hr even after 1.5 years of use. This product has an international warranty of 1 year.

Features

The device has a storage capacity of 160GB HDD which was indeed a good deal at that time. This machine also features a DVD writer, 802.11b/b WLAN, blue tooth 2.0, NVIDIA Geforce 7000M, Crystal eye webcam and Card reader. All these features at the MRP of Rs.30500, you could never get a better deal at that time.

The screen is 14' wide screen. The system weighs about 2.5 kgs. The system comes with an AC adapter and Acer device driver CD. The default OS is Linux. I have changed the OS to Win XP and later Vista.

*Cons

*One problem I noticed was that the system gets too hot to be placed on your lap after about 1 hr use, it burns your lap. This is a characteristic feature of the AMD powered systems.

Another issue I found was that the speakers are weak and do not deliver good clarity sound when volume is maximum.

Considering the cost/utility ratio and overall good quality of the system, I can promise you that this product is worth buying.