Before I even got it home.

Okay, I knew it was an older model being sold off cheap, but even so the degree of haste is a little unseemly. There's still a $300 gap, and mine still has twice the battery life of the new models, so I can deal with this particular affront.

Good: Nice screen. Big. Anti-glare. No dead pixels.

Seems fast, but I can't actually test it, for reasons that will become clear.

Bad: It has a dumb-ass keyboard. Damn. In the photos it looked identical to all the Acers I'd seen in the stores, which all had sensible keyboards. This one, though, curves. The rows of keys aren't straight. Bleah. BLEAH!

Also, it doesn't even come with a recovery CD. You get the joy of burning your own. Yays. And while it's doing this (which takes forever) it locks the keyboard and mouse.

Ugly: The disk is divided into two partitions, so I have to reformat and reinstall before doing anything else. Well, no, I have to burn a recovery disk first, two in fact, since I don't trust DVDs that much, and then I have to reformat and reinstall before doing anything else.

And it can't play the HD opening of Sumomomo Momomo any better than my old notebook. Bah.

Uglier: The restore disk that you spent all that time creating doesn't give you the option to repartition the drive. My copy of Windows XP (original) blue-screens when I try to install off that.

MCE, on the other hand, appears to be working. But there may be a problem when it comes time to activate it...

Good: Battery life. I installed Windows MCE mostly on battery, screwed it up, reinstalled it entirely on battery, and have well over three hours left. So five hours of light use is quite plausible.

Ugly: A lot of critical components - like all the networking options, for a start - are not recognised by standard Windows XP, and the recovery disk doesn't provide the drivers in any readable form.

Good: You can download all the drivers from the Acer website. On another computer. And burn them to a CD. Because they ain't getting to the notebook any other way. This lets you avoid Acer's multitude of disutilities.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:44 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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