One day all laptops will Aspire to be this Ace(r) (Acer Aspire 8930G-644G32Bn)

Member Name: SWSt

Product:	Acer Aspire 8930G-644G32Bn
Date:	28/08/09 (212 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very strong performance, excellent speakers and screen

Disadvantages: Not built for portability, poor keyboard, short-ish battery life, lack of blu-ray software support

At just under £780, the 8930G is not the cheapest laptop. However, pound for pound it offers great value for money with some good specs backed up by excellent performance. I'm not going to list the full specs, since you can grab these off the web and I don't really understand them all myself. What I'll concentrate on in this review is what it's like to actually use.

The first thing you notice is that this is NOT a portable laptop! It weighs a whopping 4Kg, and is fairly big. It's certainly not something you're going to want to lug around. It's fine to move around within your own home, but it's not a machine designed for taking on your travels.

But that's fair enough, because it is marketed as a desktop replacement and is certainly far neater than a traditional PC. Everything you need - speakers, screen, webcam, Bluetooth, wireless connectivity - is all built into the laptop, removing the need for external hardware and freeing up huge amounts of space on your desktop. I was astonished at how much extra space I suddenly had, although I soon managed to fill that up with all sorts of other rubbish!

Looking at the specs, things are pretty impressive for the price range. The machine comes with 4GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor. Again, if I'm honest, I don't really have much idea what those figures actually mean, but in practical terms, I noticed a massive difference in speed over both my smaller laptop and my old desktop system. The start-up time for the laptop is fast - usually taking less then a minute and programs load rapidly when you click on their icon. It's been able to cope with everything I've thrown at it, happily running multiple programs and performing various background tasks without any noticeable slow down in speed.

The impressive performance is backed up by more plenty of storage options. The machine comes with a 320 GB hard drive, which is likely to be sufficient for the needs of most people. There's also a CD/DVD writer for easy backup of things. There are also various ports for USB memory sticks and a 6-in-1 card reader to allow easy transfer of things like pictures from a digital camera. In short, it has the most common things your average user is going to need. The only downside I've come across so far is that, with such a large hard drive, virus scanning takes a long time.

Acer bill this as a home entertainment laptop and it's easy to see why. The 18.4 inch screen is massive when compared with many standard laptops and is fully HD compliant. Images are very well-defined and it's a great machine for watching DVDs on. The sharpness of the picture means that you can easily watch a film from the other side of the room. The screen does suffer from occasional flickering when viewed at close range, but nothing that makes it unusable. Of course, as with any LCD screen, direct sunlight can render parts of the screen unviewable, but this is a problem with screen technology more than this particular laptop. Certainly, the sun needs to be very strong before it causes serious problems and given the "summer" I've not really found it an irritant.

Although it currently runs Vista Home Premium, an upgrade to Windows 7 is available for under £15 via the Acer website. It's nice and easy to set up. The first time you run it, you are taken through the various options to set it up and even the novice user will be able to get the main functions (including wireless access) up and running within about 10 minutes of switching on.

There are two models of the 8930G. One comes with a DVD/CD writer the other comes equipped with a Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive. Personally, I'd advise going for the Blu-ray option. It costs around £80 more, but the additional flexibility is well worth it, particularly if you don't have a standalone Blu-ray player, as it's considerably cheaper than going out to buy one and will do the job just as well. The one annoying aspect is that the Acer Arcade Deluxe software, which is supposed to cater for all your home entertainment needs, doesn't support blu-ray playback. The instructions don't tell you this - I had to go on the web to find out - so you'll need to buy a media player that does support blu-ray if you want to watch them.

Sound from laptops can often disappoint, producing a rather puny, tinny output. Not so the 8930G. The fact it's aimed at the home entertainment market means that the internal speakers are pretty decent. The Dolby 5.1 speakers blast a fair amount of volume and the sound reproduction is generally of high quality. I've watched DVDs and online films on this and not noticed that much difference from a bog standard TV.

A nice idea is a touch sensitive control pad mounted in the left hand side of the machine, which you can use to increase/decrease the volume, mute the sound or even move between DVD chapters. It's a nice idea that doesn't quite come off as it can be a little unresponsive. The idea is that you touch it once to activate the panel and then can access whichever function you need. In reality I've found you have to tap it quite hard before it becomes active and it will then take two or three attempts to recognise what you are trying to do. When it works, it's a great way to alter settings without having to fiddle about with the mouse; it's just not quite been implemented well enough.

The laptop has a separate NVidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics card installed, which copes with more graphical tasks. Although it's fine for my needs (since I don't use it much for games), I suspect this would not be powerful enough as a gaming PC. It copies fine with the few older games I have, but I suspect the demands of the latest titles might be beyond it and if you're a gamer, this probably is not the laptop for you.

Inevitably, some corners have been cut. For a start, battery life is unspectacular. With light usage, a fully charged battery will last for around 3 hours, but this drops considerably to about two hours for more power intensive tasks (such as watching DVDs). But then, as I said at the start of this review, this is not really a portable laptop and is likely to spend most of its time in a single location near a plug socket, so I've never really found this to be an issue.

There are a couple of more serious flaws. The keyboard is not great. The gap between keys is quite large and it's all too easy to hit the wrong key. They also feel rather spongy and make quite an alarming clunk when depressed. Because of this, they can be a little unresponsive, which is be frustrating when typing quickly or working with long documents. It's usable enough, but it's not the most comfortable or ergonomic one I've encountered. I'm a reasonably proficient typist but I find myself making more errors with this machine than on my other laptop or a standard PC keyboard.

The chassis of the machine also feels a little cheap and plasticky. There's nothing actually wrong with the build quality and it feels sturdy enough, but the slightly cheap finish does detract a little from what is otherwise a very high quality machine.

Still, these would not be enough to stop me from recommending what is, overall, an excellent desktop replacement system with strong system specs. Of course, at the rate new laptops are being released, by the time you read this, you'll probably be able to get something twice as powerful for half the price, but I have no regrets over my decision to buy the Acer Aspire 8930G.

Basic Information
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Acer Aspire 8930G-644G32Bn
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz Processor
4 GB RAM
320 GB Hard Drive
18.4 inch HD TFT LCD
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics card
Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Rewriter
1.0 Megapixel Webcam
Wireless LAN 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N
Vista Home Premium (upgrade to Windows 7 available)

© Copyright SWSt 2009

Summary: I've not regretted buying this for one minute

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