- Jun 23, 2001
- 27,730
- 8
- 0
I bought this notebook this weekend and received it on Tuesday. Still playing with it, but here are my thoughts so far.
Pros:
I like the small laptops, so the 11.6in size of this unit fits my needs perfectly. The 720P IPS screen is a rarity on notebooks under the 400 dollar mark. Screen on this is comparable to my old Macbook Air, and definitely better than some of the cheap Walmart/Best Buy specials. The chassis itself is made of plastic, but has a decently solid feel to it and the brushed aluminum coat makes it look for more premium than it actually is. Keyboard is also back lit, again, rare on notebooks this cheap. The 0637 sku uses the A6-1450 CPU and comes with 6GB of RAM. Its a quad core, but extremely slow quad. This isn't a top performer, and I've been seeing it peg 75-85% utilization installing drivers. It can turbo to 1.4Ghz, but I haven't fully tested performance yet. It came with a 500GB 5400rpm drive, which I replaced with a 120B Kingston SSD. Replacing the hdd, and accessing the RAM, is stupidly easy. Its about a dozen really tiny screws, a SATA connector, and a ribbon. Cake, really. There's a few reviews on Newegg and Amazon stating this notebook is not upgradeable, and that's complete BS.
Cons:
Windows fricking 8. Words really cannot express how much I loathe this OS, but I'm not going to delve it that here. I will focus on other issues. Acer loads this thing up with some serious bloatware. But, I'll digress a moment. With OEM Activation 3.0, the product key is embedded into the UEFI, and if you attempt to install a retail copy of W8 onto this notebook, it will error out because its checking the UEFI for the key and its not compatible with a retail ISO. You never get the chance to enter a key. This means you can't simply pull the product key, replace the drive, pop in your retail W8 USB stick and install with the Acer key. After messing around and researching this at several W8 forums and blogs without success, I was forced to restore the mechanical drive and create a 16GB USB key restore to install the OS onto the SSD. This went smoothly, but incredibly slow. Normally, a USB pendrive install onto an SSD is a pretty quick process, but this took about 3 hours. Because that 16GB stick decompressed to nearly 85GBs on the drive. 15GB for a recovery partition and 70 for the C:. Something to be aware of, because thats 85GB out of a 120B drive. I considered that unacceptable and continued trying to figure out how to do a clean install. Most of the MSDN and other unaltered ISOs from the . . . usual sources were Pro or retail versions and errored out the mismatch error. Fixes and resolutions that apparently worked for others failed for me. I suspect its because all the OEMs handle UEFI differently. Eventually, I was able to find a Windows 8 OEM ISO buried in the torrent list. I was going to create another USB stick installer for it, but unfortunately, I was out of adequately sized sticks.
But, a DVDR disk easily burned, pulled the key from UEFI and installed without a hitch. Total size? 16GBs. Windows 8 activated without a hitch, as soon as I installed the wireless drives and connected.
I had started DLing Windows updates, but it appeared that no data was going over the WiFi for nearly 15 minutes. I decided to let it run while I went to work. Hopefully, it successfully got those updates, web browsing works perfectly fine.
Here's the results of 3Dmark 2006. I don't think I'm going to run anything more current . . . those are utterly dismal scores.
Adding the Handbrake test here too.
HandBrake 0.9.9.5530 - 64bit Version
OS: Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
CPU: AMD A6-1450 APU with Radeon(TM) HD Graphics
Ram: 5573 MB, Screen: 1366x768
x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 SSE4.2 AVX SSEMisalign LZCNT BMI1
x264 [info]: profile Main, level 3.0
[11:06:39] reader: done. 1 scr changes
[11:06:41] work: average encoding speed for job is 29.249062 fps
Pros:
I like the small laptops, so the 11.6in size of this unit fits my needs perfectly. The 720P IPS screen is a rarity on notebooks under the 400 dollar mark. Screen on this is comparable to my old Macbook Air, and definitely better than some of the cheap Walmart/Best Buy specials. The chassis itself is made of plastic, but has a decently solid feel to it and the brushed aluminum coat makes it look for more premium than it actually is. Keyboard is also back lit, again, rare on notebooks this cheap. The 0637 sku uses the A6-1450 CPU and comes with 6GB of RAM. Its a quad core, but extremely slow quad. This isn't a top performer, and I've been seeing it peg 75-85% utilization installing drivers. It can turbo to 1.4Ghz, but I haven't fully tested performance yet. It came with a 500GB 5400rpm drive, which I replaced with a 120B Kingston SSD. Replacing the hdd, and accessing the RAM, is stupidly easy. Its about a dozen really tiny screws, a SATA connector, and a ribbon. Cake, really. There's a few reviews on Newegg and Amazon stating this notebook is not upgradeable, and that's complete BS.
Cons:
Windows fricking 8. Words really cannot express how much I loathe this OS, but I'm not going to delve it that here. I will focus on other issues. Acer loads this thing up with some serious bloatware. But, I'll digress a moment. With OEM Activation 3.0, the product key is embedded into the UEFI, and if you attempt to install a retail copy of W8 onto this notebook, it will error out because its checking the UEFI for the key and its not compatible with a retail ISO. You never get the chance to enter a key. This means you can't simply pull the product key, replace the drive, pop in your retail W8 USB stick and install with the Acer key. After messing around and researching this at several W8 forums and blogs without success, I was forced to restore the mechanical drive and create a 16GB USB key restore to install the OS onto the SSD. This went smoothly, but incredibly slow. Normally, a USB pendrive install onto an SSD is a pretty quick process, but this took about 3 hours. Because that 16GB stick decompressed to nearly 85GBs on the drive. 15GB for a recovery partition and 70 for the C:. Something to be aware of, because thats 85GB out of a 120B drive. I considered that unacceptable and continued trying to figure out how to do a clean install. Most of the MSDN and other unaltered ISOs from the . . . usual sources were Pro or retail versions and errored out the mismatch error. Fixes and resolutions that apparently worked for others failed for me. I suspect its because all the OEMs handle UEFI differently. Eventually, I was able to find a Windows 8 OEM ISO buried in the torrent list. I was going to create another USB stick installer for it, but unfortunately, I was out of adequately sized sticks.
But, a DVDR disk easily burned, pulled the key from UEFI and installed without a hitch. Total size? 16GBs. Windows 8 activated without a hitch, as soon as I installed the wireless drives and connected. I had started DLing Windows updates, but it appeared that no data was going over the WiFi for nearly 15 minutes. I decided to let it run while I went to work. Hopefully, it successfully got those updates, web browsing works perfectly fine.
Here's the results of 3Dmark 2006. I don't think I'm going to run anything more current . . . those are utterly dismal scores.
Adding the Handbrake test here too.
HandBrake 0.9.9.5530 - 64bit Version
OS: Microsoft Windows NT 6.2.9200.0
CPU: AMD A6-1450 APU with Radeon(TM) HD Graphics
Ram: 5573 MB, Screen: 1366x768
x264 [info]: using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 SSE4.2 AVX SSEMisalign LZCNT BMI1
x264 [info]: profile Main, level 3.0
[11:06:39] reader: done. 1 scr changes
[11:06:41] work: average encoding speed for job is 29.249062 fps
Last edited:
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