Acer Aspire 9813WKMi - Core 2 Duo T5500 1.66 GHz - 20.1" TFT > Reviews > great ! , but could be better

Author's product rating:   

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

Advantages:	screen
Disadvantages:	ram !  !

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

When I first came across this laptop, my first thoughts were of how big it was, its screen size is a fantastic 20.1 inches however this does make the laptop really big and bulky and may just be too much for some people who want to carry their laptops around,
I for one, would defiantly not get this laptop if you want one to carry around with you a lot, however I would get this If I wanted to keep it on a desk most of the time like I do with my current laptop.

There are some pretty amazing features on this laptop, firstly ill talk about it screen, its 20.1 inches and is really good clear quality too, which means it is great for watching movies on, for playing games on and even just for web browsing as the size of the screen means you could have 2 documents open at once.
For example you could be doing work and need a word document open, and need an internet explorer window open too, to get information, so this can be very handy.
This screen is also active matrix, this is being used by so much more laptop manufacturers nowadays as it makes the screen lighter, therefore making the laptop lighter, is makes the image quality so much better than a normal TFT screen and it also makes the response time a lot better, which makes videos look sharper, photos look sharper and game playing look better than ever before.

To say its got a great screen size, it has a quite disappointing amount of ram, it only has 1 gb, which is ok but it really does drag the speed down on the laptop.
The main problem I experienced with the lack of ram, was that when I tried playing some internet videos on here, the shorter ones played fine, but some of the longer ones took quite long to load and then even stopped all the time through.

However there is a good point too, this ram can be upgraded to a maximum of 4 gb, this would really make the laptop so much faster, and because of the other features that are so good on this laptop, then I would advise to get this done.
However this can be dear, especially if you don’t want to do it yourself and need to pay a computer technician to do it.
Another downside to doing this yourself is the risk you might damage or break the laptop if you didn’t know what you were doing, and this wouldn’t be covered by the warranty so its best to get somebody who really knows what there talking about.

The hard drive space is pretty good, and to say its only got 1 gb of ram, and you would expect it to have just 80 gb of storage space, however its actually got 120 which is ok, and can store quite a lot of things and will probably be enough for most people.

Another thing this laptop has, that I must mention, is a built in card reader, this can read any of SD Memory Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo. This makes transferring pictures and videos off your camera or off your phones a lot easier than having to connect everything by wires and having one built into this laptop means you don’t have to go out and spend another £20 on buying a card reader.

Another thing I must mention then is that this laptop also does have a built in webcam at the top of its screen. This is mounted onto a nice little silver section on the top of the screen which instead of looking like an eye sore, actually makes the laptop look in a way better. This camera is an Integrated 1.3 Mega pixel webcam which captures pictures at a very high 1280 x 1024 resolution.

Having an web cam installed means you don’t have to go out and buy one for about another £40, it also means you don’t have to get home and install It and worry about whether it works or not. It also means you don’t have to have wires all over your desk and a huge camera on the top of your desktop.
The best thing about having a webcam built in must be the fact that you don’t need you do anything with it, and because its built into your laptop you wont need to take another webcam with you wherever you go, because its built into your laptop and your webcam will always be with you.

Altogether, I must say because of its screen size I really love this, I think it looks good too, and even though it has a massive screen it still pulls off a pretty impressive 2 hours battery life.
If you want something for watching movies on, then this is great, if you want something for playing games on then this is really good too, however I must warn you, some of the newer games maybe will be a little slow, however adding more ram will improve this.