Acer Aspire 1350

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Average
Look & Feel	Good
Comfort & Portability	Satisfactory
Robustness & Durability	Satisfactory
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Has a host of connectivity options
Disadvantages:	Expensive to upgrade and no floppy drive

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

When you first turn the Aspire 1350 on, it sounds like a jet turnin on its engines. It's so loud, I honestly cannot think of another laptop that makes a noise like it! However, after that initial burst of noise, its one of the quietest on the market!

LOOKS

The Aspire looks good. There's no doubting it! It has a stylish silver front cover lid, and then when you open the lid you have a nicely sized keyboard and screen. 7 silver shortcut buttons abover the keyboard, and then underneath has the acer touchpad with silver buttons and a scroll button which works in the same way as a scroll bar on a mouse button. By this I mean when your surfing on the internet, u can press on one of the direction buttons on the scroll button, and the web page will scoll in that direction if its available.

CONNECTIVITY

The Aspire has the capability to connect you to just about anything, anywhere. As long as you pay the extra to have it installed! The AMD Athlon processor is designed to allow you to connect to the internet anywhere, but you need the hardware installed.
It comes with Bluetooth and Infrared ports but not as standard. Two of the shortcut buttons are even assigned for them but wont work if you did not have them installed. You cannot even reprogram these buttons which is a bit of a disadvantage if you have more then 2 programs you want to assign quick shortcuts to, but more about these later.

UPRGADABLE

Of course if you decide not to have the Bluetooth or Infrared devices installed when you first purchase the laptop, you can quite easily have them installed at a late date. The motherboard and hard drives can also be upgraded, and extra RAM installed as well, but these will of course cost a fair amount of money! The RAM can be upgraded yourself, but you will need to send the laptop off to ACER to have the motherboard and hard drives upgaded, or to any other company that can perform the upgrades.

THE SHORTCUT BUTTONS

As I mentioned earlier, there are 7 shortcut buttons, 4 of these are programmable to some extent. The Bluetooth and Infrared buttons will only work if those devices are installed. There are "P1" and "P2" buttons which will run a program or open a file at the touch of a button. Then you have your shortcuts for connecting you to the internet and to your email client. And finally your power button which powers the laptop up or down.

WHAT YOU GET

The Aspire 1350 has been well designed, and offers a lot for its cheap price. You have a spare hardware drive slot, where a floopy disk or another CD player for example can be placed. 4 USB ports, CD-RW with DVD playback. There is the usual ports for attaching a monitor for example, but the one thing you would expect it to have but doesn't, is a P/S2 port. If your wanting to attach a mouse, it will have to be a USB mouse!

THE DISADVANTAGES

I cannot think of many problems or disadvantages with the laptop, but the few that there are, they are quite major ones, and it's mainly to do with the performance and durability. One minor disadvantage is the lack of a floppy drive. If you do use these still, then you are going to struggle, but the CD-RW, USB ports and the Bluetooth and Infrared devices if you have these two installed, are ways around transferring documents from device to device.
Another problem is battery life. At best you will get a couple of hours out of it, but it seems to drain so quickly!
The major problem I find with this laptop is the speed of the processor when you have a few progrmas running, or when you hard drive begins to become full. Now i understand that this is the same with desktop and other laptop computers, but you can see the difference between the speed when you have a few files on your computer, and when your running a major program or have a full hard drive. The speed is shocking, and it does really seem to struggle at times! You may get a pop up warining you that the processor is struggling as well, something that shocked me when I first saw it, as the AMD Athlon is ment to be quite a powerfull processor.
Finally, the durability, and this is a problem I seem to have with all ACER laptops I have. The touchpad buttons no longer work that well. It can take a while for you to just double click on a shortcut icon, or if you click on the 'x' in the corner to close a window, it can sometimes stick and close down the window underneath. Admittadly this has only just happened after a couple of years of use.
The other durability issue I have is with the screen. I'm not sure if this happens on all models of laptops, but has happened on both ACER machines I've had. The hinges that hold the screen to the laptop have cracked the base of the plastic that holds the screen in place. Unfortunatly this costs a fortune to replace, so once it falls off, and it will, you may as well buy a new computer! Its something I dont expect, but like I said, i'm not entirely sure if this happends on all models of laptops.

SPECS

Just a quick look at what the spec is of the basic model.

C drive with 18.1GB capacity
D drive with 9.75GB capacity
CD/RW with DVD player
4 2.0 USB ports

XP Home edition

AMD Athlon XP-M processor

Basically this is a good laptop, but not worth nearly £1000 which is what I paid for it at the time. Of course, it is no longer worth that amount as at the time it was one of the best, and now you can buy much better models, and it can now be found for around £400 on the internet. I personally believe this is more like the price it is worth because of what you get, but i'm sure there are better laptops out there for the same price with more features.
Personally, I have never had any performance problems except for the slower speed, but it is just the durability I feel ACER lets its self down with. If you want a cheap laptop that will last for a few years to do your basic stuff, then this is probably as good as any laptop out there! Being a student, I would recommend it to other students. It wil most likely last the length of your course and in that time it is unlikey you will have any problems!