Review of Acer Aspire 2012WLMi

[acmadude]

So, not too long ago, my new laptop finally got here. Turns out that if I had waited all of a week, I could've gotten it for about $200 cheaper. Just my luck, eh? At any rate, I thought I'd give a review of this great laptop.

Before I say anything else, I'll mention that I'll be comparing this to my old IBM Thinkpad 600e, which has served me very well despite having a mere Pentium II @ 366Mhz and 192MB RAM

The Acer Aspire 2012WLMi

Before I begin, here are the basic tech specs:

Pentium M 1.5Ghz
512 MB RAM (2 DIMMs)
ATI Radeon 9700 Mobility
15.4 inch WXGA screen (1280 x 800)
Wireless 802.11b/g
DVD+/-RW Drive
60GB Hard drive (4200 RPM)
4-in-1 card reader [Just my luck; my camera uses compact flash, which this doesn’t read]
Windows XP Professional
Weighs: 6.6 lbs
Battery life: ~5 hours

The Screen

The screen is very nice overall. I really like the whole widescreen deal. I can have a browser window open to a decent size, but still have room onscreen for an AIM window and winamp. It's just weird not always maximizing my windows (considering I've used 1024 x 768 for as long as I can remember). The aspect ratio makes the screen perfect for watching DVD's (that's using Acer's Arcade software for viewing; Windows Media Player don't take advantage of widescreen though; you end up with black bars on all sides). I did have about two dead pixels that I barely ever notice (one is stuck on a dark blue, another on a reddish color). They’re each about as noticeable as specs of dust.

The Keyboard

My main source of gripe. My old Thinkpad had a spectacular keyboard. That thing was nice and springy and responsive and just had a good feel. I can't really say the same about this one, unfortunately. For example, most keyboards nowadays have a little piece of the caps lock cut out so you can feel a gap when your pinky's about to miss the 'A' key; this one doesn't. It feels a bit cramped and doesn't have built-in Home and End keys (they're easy to access using the function keys, though). On the other hand, it does have the windows key and the application key that my Thinkpad doesn't have (but I have never gotten any use out of the latter). On the plus side, it has 4 programmable buttons at the top (which you don’t see too often in laptops).

Oh well, I was going to try out an external natural keyboard anyway.

The touchpad

I gotta say, I miss the trackpoint on my thinkpad, but I'm getting used to the touchpad. Some have complained about the buttons being stiff, but I haven't had any problems with them. There's also a 4-direction circular button that acts in place of a scroll wheel, which works pretty well. The only problem is that it's easy to accidentally touch the pad while typing, but I guess that’s not unique to this laptop.

Hard Drive:

The included hard drive is a 60GB 4200RPM drive. It has a 10GB partition set aside for recovery. I'm not sure how exactly it works, so I really can't say much about it. Also, the partitions are formatted in the ancient FAT32 file system for some odd reason.

4200RPM is actually pretty slow, so I decided to swap it out with a 7200 RPM drive (I still have the old one in a USB enclosure, so it's not like I've wasted it or anything). What I did was I used a program called XXClone to copy the main partition to the partition on my new drive (which was in the external enclosure) and make that bootable.

It turns out the included hard drive has a special plug extender that makes it dock into the case a lot easier, so I became really confused when I first saw it. But at any rate, after a bunch of confusion, I realized I could just take it off and stick it on the new one. Anyway, the new one works fine and I'm glad I got it.

I didn’t use it very long before I replaced the hard drive (I had decided in advance to replace it), but it really didn’t seem that slow. Definitely usable, but I’m still happier with the 7200 RPM drive.

Wireless:

The wireless works well too. I did have one problem, though. Once I tried using wireless while on battery power, it started working incredibly slow (to the point of being unusable). Turns out, the problem was that when you switch to battery power, the wireless transmitter goes into power saving mode (and decreases performance). Once I changed that in the preferences, it worked fine. If you get a Centrino laptop, don’t even bother trying to throttle down the wireless performance just for the sake of power management.

Performance:

Ah, the most important part of all. Overall, this thing performs very well (and not just compared to my old Pentium II ). I got a score of 2528 in 3DMark 2003 with the included video drivers. It turns out that ATI doesn't directly support its mobility product lines when it comes to drivers; you basically have to make due with what ever your manufacturer will give you or do what I did and download 3rd drivers from Omegadrivers.net. After doing so I got a score of 2580 in 3Dmark '03. This isn’t a spectacular score, but it’s pretty good for a laptop.

So far, the only game I've tested is UT2K4, which runs great. I tried it at 1280 x 800, which actually wasn't too bad. With normal settings, I was getting 20-30 FPS which isn't bad compared to what I was used to only my old desktop (Pentium II and an ATI Radeon). It runs great in lower resolutions, though.

All in all, the performance can't be beat for this thing's price.

Portability:

Well, with a 15.4 inch screen this obviously isn’t meant as an ultraportable laptop, but it’s got actually pretty light for its size. It weighs 6 and a half pounds (3 kg), but a lot of other laptops at this size weigh a good bit more. It’s casing is plastic, so it might not feel as strong as laptops with aluminum casing, but it still feels more dependable than most of the cheaper Dells I’ve used (I haven’t used Dell’s more expensive models, so I can’t compare). Still not necessarily the most durable laptop I’ve ever used. Some of Acer’s other models use aluminum casing, though.

The advertised battery life is 5 hours, which is actually pretty accurate. If you have wireless on (or if you have the contrast set really high), it’ll go down a bit, but still over 4 hours.

It doesn't get too hot during general usage, but like any other laptop it'll get a bit uncomfortable after extended use. After extended high-performance usage, it does get a bit hot.

The machine is virtually silent, except under high performance when the fan kicks in (which really isn't very loud). The DVD drive does get pretty loud though (and it sometimes makes the screen vibrate a little).

Sound:

The speakers aren’t too bad for laptop speakers. They’re a lot better than the ones on my old Thinkpad. Nonetheless, the highs can easily sound garbled. The mids sound fine but the bass (unsurprisingly) isn’t too strong. I really like the AC 97 karaoke options though (you can enable voice cancellation and real-time key transposition (in other words, you can listen to music transposed to up to 4 half steps above or below its actual key, although the quality suffers))


So, to sum up:
Pros:

• Great price
• Good performance
• Excellent performance-to-price ratio
• Good screen
• Great battery life
• DVD burner
• Relatively portable
• 4-in-1 card reader

Cons:

• 4200 RPM hard drive
• Weird hard drive partitioning
• Newer Dothan processors are more powerful
• ATI Radeon Mobility 9800 coming out soon
• Mediocre keyboard
• Only 3 USB Ports (what can I say? I have lots of gadgets! (of course, that's what USB hubs are for))
• Doesn’t include any office software (not necessarily a con if you don’t want any included)

Bottom line: if you want a good value gaming laptop or even a good general-purpose widescreen laptop, this is a great choice. If you want a really powerful laptop and are willing to spend more, look more closely at the newer Dothan laptops.

All in all, I'm happy with my purchase.

I’ll try to post pictures if I get around to it.c