Great value laptop (Acer Travelmate 290XCi)

Member Name: Plymyphil

Product:	Acer Travelmate 290XCi
Date:	17/01/04 (442 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Price, bangs per buck, centrino

Disadvantages: Slightly cheap feel

Working in education has highs and lows - readers of my previous opinions will have followed me on this rollercoaster. I'm just coming up to that bleak few months in the runup to the new financial year when the money has gone and invariably anything for which I am responsible will break down and cost moeny to repair or replace. In the midst of the inevitable gloom we have a little star bringing light to my world.

Light is great but when it's someone elses torch, it's even better - mmm - perhaps that's an analogy too far. This you see was free to me. Every once in a while an act of community benevolence (usually followed by an act of community smiling in the community newspaper) leads us to receive free technology. This three baby was an unexpected joy about three months ago and has been put to great use. It came with three lower specced machines, also Acer and after three months of use I feel I can comment on their reliability and service.

COMPARISONS
Firstly, let's get rid of my only niggle. It feels slightly cheap. The keyboard feels slightly too clicky and clunky and the screen is definitely not quite up to the standard of the Toshiba I run for my own laptop. We do have one Sony in school and this Acer lags far behind that in the design stakes. That said, not only was it free to me it is also consistently cheaper than similarly specced Toshiba laptops and substantially cheaper than any Sony laptop.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX
Without going into too much techie detail - you see, I do respond to the comments left by kind readers - here is the outline.

A 1.4GHz Centrino processor - more than enough for most applications.
A DVD-CDRW drive. This is great - watch films and backup your essential data.
256Mb RAM - plenty to run the included operating system of Window XP Professional.
20Gb Hard drive - looking slightly small even compared to laptop hard drives but enough for most users especially if you
are not a big gamer.

THE EXPERIENCE
With the techie details out of the way, what matters is the user experience. This machine is one of our heaviest used. Windows XP obviously is great for networking - unless you have a very old network with an NT server and then all sorts of problems pop up with permissions. If you have a network and know what I mean ;-) - if not, don't feel left out - read on and I won't mention it again. This is a shame as the Centrino badge is a guarantee of built in wireless networking and therefore ideal for networking. Sometime in the next twelve months we will take advantage of this and then I will edit this review to reflect the new experience.
This machine is therefore not connected to our network and is therefore moved around consistently. Now, moving laptops can make problems - my Toshiba for example chewed its own hard drive in under a month.
This Acer seems remarkably robust. One of the lower specced Acers has even been dropped - admittedly in it's padded case - and just bounced back into life again. This is exceptional robustness in a laptop and really needs praising into the middle of next week.
I do remember many moons ago attending a presentation in which Acer claimed to have one of the lowest figures in the industry for warranty repairs and these machines seem to back up that reputation.
Windows XP is an ideal operating system and allows the easy setup of multiple users on one computer. The administrator can have a fair amount of say over what applications and services the user has. This is ideal for our situation where in a standard day this machine are used by upto thirty people.

OVERALL
I recommend this and not only because it was free to me. As somebody with extensive experience of laptops these seem remarkably robust. The price off the shelf is also a fair deal in the bang per bucks stakes. They do feel slightly inferior so if you are fashion conscious, be aware. However,
as somebody who shuns fashion for good financial acumen I totally recommend a look at this product and others in the Acer stable.

Thanks for reading this opinion. I hope it succeeds in informing your purchasing decisions and look forward to reading your replies - Phil

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