Acer Aspire 4720z

Acer Aspire 4720z

My daughter recently got a surprise package from her uncle who works in the Bahamas. Opening the package with puzzlement, she found out to her whistlin’ happiness. Her favorite uncle sent her a laptop computer: an Acer Aspire 4207z. Although I think that she’s too young to have a laptop of her own, I was happy for her. She’s off to some school activity this Saturday afternoon, I snuck into her room to test the laptop out. This is her first laptop and I know it would do well for her as she just would use the unit to play music, surf the ‘Net, work on her assignments, and chat with her friends.

From first looks, the laptop doesn’t look bad at all. The lid has a shiny black finish while the rest of the laptop is off-white. Looks pretty – but the unit was darned heavy. I think it weighs close to 3 kilograms. The laptop is also thick – more than an inch thick. Since I hate heavy laptops, I was immediately disappointed. Well, it’s just me. I proceeded to check out the rest of the physical construction and I can say that the USDB ports, card reader and VGa ports are well placed. Oh, one more thing – the screen does not latch to the body when closed.

Upon checking the specs, I read that the laptop comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of RAM, the usual Intel Graphics Media Accelerator found on many laptops, a nice 160GB HDD, 14.1″ LCD screen, a DVD-R/W drive, a 5-in-1 card reader, Dolby Digital Live audio and the usual bunch of telecom stuff i.e. fax/modem, LAN, Bluetooth and WiFi. Nice! Then, I saw the OS that came with the laptop – it was Windows Vista. Not nice.

It took forever for Windows Vista to open then fully-load all the apps than were installed on the machine, which were just the usual anti-virus, firewall app, Bluetooth loader. I mean I was already happily typing away on my on my own laptop for 5 minutes or so and I swear that Vista has not yet finished loading. Bummer. When I clicked on Control Panel, Vista took it’s sweet time to load the UI again. Setting the unit up for LAN access was even more frustrating as it took Vista more than six minutes to load Network Connections. After an eternity or so of wait, I finally got to configure the laptop to connect to the Internet and I opened the built-in browser, which is (you guessed it), Internet Explorer. Oh boy.

Internet Explorer took forever to load the default home page, which is just Google. Since I’m no real fan of Internet Explorer, I decided to download then install Firefox. The download went well and fast. Installation time was pretty decent. So, having installed Firefox, I proceeded to put the unit through it’s paces i.e. surfing the Internet and downloading files of various sizes. Performance and download time was pretty decent but I attribute this to the speed of my Internet connection and to Firefox.

I saw that Yahoo! Messenger was installed so I thought it would be a pretty good idea to log-on and check-in with my buddies who I was sure were on-line. I immediately regretted it as it took Vista forever to load YM. Okay, once I got my friends and I chatting, I tried VoIP and the built-in webcam. The resulution of the webcam is decent: 640 x 480 – more than enough for chatting with someone over the internet. As I was happily chatting away, I noticed that the LCD screen used Cyrtalbrite technology, which gave a nice clear and crisp display. However, I noticed that the surface of the LCD screen was too glossy and I’m afraid that it would be succeptible to scratches. I played around with the displayable resolution and the max I could get was 1280×800, which is actually pretty good. After my friends and I stopped chatting, I thought I’d work on some office stuff. So I inserted my external HDD and double-clicked on a Word document that I needed to work on.

As with some of the other apps, Word took long to word. I wanted to pop some popcorn to pass away my boredom while Word 2007 loads. I know, I know – I’m exaggerating with the popcorn thing but Vista again took it’s sweet time to load Word. Once Vista was able to load Word, I proceeded to type away and then I noticed that the keyboard had a fragile feel. I’ve heavy hands and I bang the keyboard a bit harder than the ordinary folk so I asked my daughter to type away just to check. She had the same conclusion: the keyboard is a bit fragile and could possibly broken by a heavy gamer. I would have preferred a stronger construction but her, we got this for free right? I do think however that the ‘fee’ of the keyboard is subjective to the user’s style of typing. In fairness, the keyboard is very responsive. Okay, time to do multi-media and some gaming.

As the unit came in with a Dolby sound system, I was pretty sure that the speakers would produce very good audio. So I slapped on my favorite The Cream CD and proceeded to rock out. Boy, was my over excitement deflated. The sound quality of the speakers was not I expected it to be. You might be asking “But it has Dolby, so audio should sound nice right?” Wrong. While the audio did not sound as awful as what I usually get on my Dell D430, it ain’t for a disco party. The Acer Aspire 4720z is not a full multi media rig so the quality of the audio was just about right for the segment of the market it belongs to. Slapping on a pair of Sennheiser earphones greatly helped the audio quality. Watching a movie was a pretty good experience overall, thanks to the nifty LCD screen where I can view scenes from almost any angle so I’m pretty sure my daughter would enjoy watching movies from the unit.

Although I haven’t played games in a while using a laptop computer, I usually load a game or two when I’m testing out a computer unit. So I installed my Need for Speed – Hot Pursuit game ad my Delta Force – Xtreme game. Vista performed decently as far as installation time goes but loading the game is another story. Luckily, I have another bag of popcorn in hand. Gaming quality is pretty decent but if you’re a hardcore gamer and primarily use a laptop for gaming, I’d advise you to stay away from the unit – go buy an Alienware unit or something. Just as I was about to shutdown the computer, I remembered I had a 3D-Mark 06 CD inside my laptop bag so I decided to install it out of curiosity and see what I score I can crank out of the unit. To my delight, the Acer Aspire scored an astounding 412.

All in all, I think the Acer Aspire 4720z is not a bad unit if you’re just an average user who’s just looking for a laptop computer to do everyday chores like surf the ‘Net, do Friendster…wait…that ain’t an everyday chore…work on Excel or Word files, then I think the unit would work well for you. As for me, I plan to remove Vista from the machine, purchase 1GB ram then purchase and install Windows XP. I think these changes/add-ons will improve performance times. Hmm…maybe I’d just install Ubuntu Linux instead. Hey, if these plans of mine don’t work, I can always sell the machine and buy that cute Asus EEPC that my daughter wants.

Cheers!

UPDATE (05-October-08):

I just finished installing and setting-up a licensed version of Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Based on early tests, the unit is performing faster compared to Vista. In away, the downgrade is good as my daugther is more familiar with XP than Vista.