Acer Extensa 4620Z Laptop Review

The Acer Extensa 4620Z is the sort of machine designed for people that work more than play. Mine came with Windows XP, which is a plus no matter what Microsoft says about Vista. With XP, it is relatively fast, comes with a good amount of memory, and will run most of your applications (world, excel, power point, OpenOffice, statistical software, photo editors, etc) without any issues. Plays and writes CDs and DVDs, and has some really foolproof presentation settings (point-and-click presentation mode: it saves to the time to change your settings when you use a LCD projector and stuff). It also reads SD/XD cards, so you can copy your photos from the camera to the laptop without issues. Plenty of ports (4 USB, 1 firewire, LAN, VGA, SVGA), wireless G, IR, bluetooth, and and ol' fax modem (really useful when you travel abroad!). Battery is pretty decent (once again, you use point-and-click settings to choose 'maximum battery' vs. 'maximum' processing power. also love the backup software that came bundled with the system: it copies your files to another disk partition... so if something happens, you have backup!

I have two issues with this laptop. The first is that it has two of the less powerful speakers ever. If you want to listen to music, or a movie, or anything in any place with a little bit of noise, you need headphones... otherwise the volume is just plain too low. The second, is that its cover (the top of it, the plastic thingy that covers the screen) scratches easily. So, you should get a neoprene cover for your laptop if you plan to carry it around.

Also, you can run/install Ubuntu Linux on this machine. The only known issue (so far) is configuring your wireless card, but that has more to do with the card-drivers than Acer itself. LAN works perfectly.



Finally, did I mention that this is a cheap machine?