Acer Aspire AS4830T-6872 Intel Core I3-2330M 6GB 750GB 14IN HD BT DVDRW W7HP64 Notebook

Comment:
Replaced a much maligned and aged Dell (rather expensive for its time - first XPS series). Purchased my first laptop (also an Acer) from NCIX several years ago and had no qualms about the brand. Went from an all-metal 15-inch lugger (including aluminum keyboard) to a metal topped and otherwise plastic 14-incher and for the price I am quite pleased. Fit and finish are very good and I had forgotten in recent years what it was like to have laptop that would hold its own on battery power for more than about 90 minutes. Your mileage will vary of course, but we're looking at more than 5 hours on a reasonably balanced power management profile. 14-incher yes, but this is no ultralight. Thick enough for an optical drive and hefty enough. My Dell had a 7200 RPM drive and somehow I feel the 5400 in the Acer is a little pokier (even though the technology in the Seagate is more advanced with a larger buffer and sector size). At the same time, the (newer) drive consumes much less power (as does the i3 processor). Bloatware be gone. As I have done with other laptops, I wipe everything out of the box and install a clean version of Windows. You will find links and instructions on the web for this. You install a version that matches the Acer OEM (i.e. Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit) and you activate it with the key provided by Acer (on the body of the laptop). Load the Acer Win version first and use the back-up utility to prepare a disk of drivers. If you can't be bothered with this, take the time to uninstall the bloat. My first "Chiclet" keyboard. Not fond of the left Shift key placement (cheek to jowl with a backslash key) but overall it's fine. Audio = Dolby = "Professionally Tuned". Better than "Amateur Tuned" I suppose. (It's like "professional dry cleaning"). There appear to be tweeters at the top of the keyboard and speakers (woofers?) underneath the laptop at both front corners. Audio is fine. Most would use ear buds anyway I presume. Wi-fi performance is fine. A battery gauge light that you can press (with main power on or off) to see the charge state is a nice touch as is the (lone) USB 3.0 port that provides external device charging with power on or off. Screen resolution and brightness are fine. Never understood this business about "viewing angles" in the "professional" reviews. It's a 14-inch laptop meant to be used by one person - head-on. The i3 processor and 6 GB of RAM are fine to keep this laptop zipping along nicely for general purpose use.