Acer 9502 will be here tomorrow.

Hi,

My new Acer 9502 should be here tomorrow. Once I have it, I will write a short review of my first impressions.

 

Well it is here. This my quick take on the notebook.
This is a large laptop. Much bigger then I thought it would be. But, that's OK as I use it mostly as a desktop replacement. The screen is very good, good colors and excellent brightness.

The hard drive does not have a RAM buffer, (0). I believe that the speed is 4200 RPM.
On a test that I ran I got these figures. Transfer rate average - 21.2 MB/sec, Access time - 19.1 ms, Burst rate - 62.8 ms and CPU usage - 9%. Oh yes, it is a Toshiba drive.

My unit came with one stick of Hynix RAM. PC2 4200, 444-12 timings.

The installed BIOS is version 1.60. I was surprised at how few settings are availabe in the BIOS. But, this might be normal as this is my first experience with a laptop.

Build quality seems fine to me. Not much flex in the large 17" LCD. You can push on the back of the LCD and see some distortion. Not as bad as some other I have looked at in the stores.

All in all, I am enjoying the system. The battery gives my 2 to 3 hours of time. Keyboard is taking some getting use to as it is not quite standard.

Hope this helps some.

Regards.

 

Hi,

Thank you for your short review. Actually, I could not find any more reviews on the net about Acer Aspire 9502 WSMI.

After the last months, how do you feel about the machine? Are you satisfied?
Is it fast?
Does it have outside volume control?
Isn't it too hot?
Any bugs, problems you know about?

I am about to replace a Fujitsu-Siemens M3438G, which is quite similar to this acer, but is a piece of ****. I have burnt myself with this one, I gave a lot of money for it, but it simply does not work correctly.

Thanks.

 

I am generally pleased with the laptop. I added an additional 512 of RAM and replaced the stock HD. It only was a 4200 with zero cashe (buffer).

Screen is nice and bright, good colors and contrast. Good keyboard, and lots of ports. After I replaced the HD, I put stock drive in an exterior USB case. So I have 100 GB of external storage now.

Build quality is good. It is heavy and rather large for a laptop. I have been getting about 1.5 to 2 hours of battery life. Depends on how much you use the DVD drive. Video card works well. I don't play a lot of games, but General's Zero Hour and Civ4 play very well.

It is not hot, runs very cool. You can control the volume with the keyboard and the "fn" key. The speed seems OK to me, but it is not as fast as my desktop AMD64 3500 machine. Can't say about how it is compared to another laptop, as this is my first laptop.

I have not had any issues at all with the machine. I got mine from ZZF and I was not happy with the service I got from them. I should have stayed with NewEgg. Can't beat NE for service and fast shipping.
If you have any other questions, just ask.