Acer Aspire 9304wsmi Laptop

...laptop in question is the Acer Aspire 9304WSMi, we purchased it from our local Comet store for £499.95 which I think was extremely reasonable when I found that when looking for a nice little laptop with all the specs darling hubby wanted a Sony Vaio with similar (slightly less) specs would set me back around the £1200 mark!! It came with the mains plug and a free upgrade trial disc but as I don't want to upgrade anymore just yet it is still unopened ...
...this includes things such as Acer Crystalbrite Brilliant LCD Performance ( It is a very good screen, 17inches in size and very very clear), Acer Arcade Deluxe, Media center enrichment this is basically a DVD programme for burning copying etc but it doesn't convert files but it is a nice little extra to play around with, Acer empowering Technology, optimised usability for mobile excellence, I will admit to only briefly checking this out it seems to ... more

Well now as I have said before I am not a very 'techie' kind of girl but I thought well I've got a new laptop and I have got quite a bit to say about it so what the hell. For any real technical minded people out there I apologise profusely now!!

Right well I am writing this review using Microsoft Windows 7.0 and according the pop up box you get 23 free goes before you have to enter the product key after that well who knows maybe I'll lose word forever... so again I am doing what I do well and that is waffle!!

The laptop in question is the Acer Aspire 9304WSMi, we purchased it from our local Comet store for £499.95 which I think was extremely reasonable when I found that when looking for a nice little laptop with all the specs darling hubby wanted a Sony Vaio with similar (slightly less) specs would set me back around the £1200 mark!! It came with the mains plug and a free upgrade trial disc but as I don't want to upgrade anymore just yet it is still unopened in the box! It was very easy and simple to get up and running although being a Vista virgin there was a few problems to follow...

I feel I have to add that I will be adding all the specs further on down but I like to put my experience across first before you see the great specs.
Now to give a bit of background on why we got the laptop in the first place and what it was needed for let me give you a short and sweet(is) version. Whilst I was quite happy using my very capable packard bell computer (desk top) that I had paid a lot of money for less than 12 months ago some other peeps in my home decided that we needed more and less. More so that my teenage son could have the very nice Packard bell in his bachelor pad bedroom, my eldest daughter the older computer from said sons room and us to have a smaller but just as capable laptop for our own use. Now as my son is just starting his GSCE courses and all his schoolwork seems to be on the net or using a computer we thought the desktop would be better for him as it could be added to if necessary and I have to admit I quite liked the idea of a funky little laptop perched on my lap!!

The programme on the laptop is Windows Vista Home Premium, this includes things such as Acer Crystalbrite Brilliant LCD Performance ( It is a very good screen, 17inches in size and very very clear), Acer Arcade Deluxe, Media center enrichment this is basically a DVD programme for burning copying etc but it doesn't convert files but it is a nice little extra to play around with, Acer empowering Technology, optimised usability for mobile excellence, I will admit to only briefly checking this out it seems to be a lot of shortcuts to making life on the laptop a lot easier and quicker with toolbars etc , Acer Video Conference Effective online communication now I think this is where the funky little built in webcam at the top of the laptop comes in it cannot be turned all the way round but upto to 225 degrees is good enough for me! Yes we've played with that one it is a very clear picture/motion screen and you can capture incredibly vibrant pictures on it (I know this as there is a very unflattering one of me stored on it!) I think that this is a great extra as it means you could have 'live' chats via IM but a lot more personal if you see what I mean on the other hand could be a bit dodgy if you haven't got dressed nor done your hair!! Finally we have Acer Signal up-High Efficiency antenna technology now can you hear me say Mmmmm well I am still undecided about this let me explain why.

We are currently using BT as our phone/Internet provider and we have the BT Home hub which until the swap around worked very for us. We spent 2 days on the phone to comet, Acer and BT to find out that with Vista you don't need to use your normal internet providers software you just use explorer and load up your homepage from your users sites! So this is what we did, and yes we did have the internet up and running but it does slow down quite a bit when not plugged into the mains and if you are in any room other than the one with the hub in it does regularly disconnect which can be very annoying. The other problem we have had is that suddenly the now wireless enabled desktop upstairs will not recognise the hubs IP address!! Also the filters that we used with the desktop do not work with the laptop strange I know but BT said they would send some new ones out free of charge in 7-10 days so I can't really grumble about that...well I can really because it means that if I want to use the laptop online I am left without a landline phone which I need most of the time as my little lad has fits etc.

Now onto the battery, it was charged as stated in handbook (which I might add is not very helpful at all, only a few pages about turning on, charging etc) it will give about 1 hour 30 minutes time BUT if you are using the laptop to play games or surf the net then this does reduce to about an hour which is about half an hour or so shorter than stated on specs. The keyboard is very nice to use although I can feel the edge of the laptop rubbing my wrists right now as this is the first time I have used it for a lot of typing. The touch pad is very sensitive and only needs a gentle touch to work. It also has a drive for things like your phone SD memory cards or camera memory cards which again very handy if like me forever taking pics of the kids with the phone... The multi screen use is very handy and I find it quite useful if you are trying to research stuff or do comparisons on things to buy etc (I forgot to say it has Acer Gridvista-Multi screen resolution Oops!)

Now I am going to add the Specs for this baby:

• AMD Turion tm64 x2 Mobile Technology TL-56 (1.8Ghz, 2 x 512KB L2 cache)
• 17" WXGA+ Acer Crystalbrite tm LCD
• Up to 528MB NVIDIA Geforce tm Go 6100 Turbocache tm
• 160GB HDD
• DVD-Super Multi DL
• 2GB DDR2
• 802.11b/g WLAN
Did I mention about the pre-loaded games on the laptop well they are quite cool as pre-loads go we've got Chess Titans, Freecell, Hearts, Inkball, Mahjong Titans (my favourite but quite hard), 

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