Sourabh’s blog

Acer Aspire 3002NLC

Notebook Specifications:

Processor: Mobile AMD Sempron™ processor 2800+(1.6 GHz)
Chipset: SiSM760GX
Main Memory: 256 Mb DDR-RAM @333Mhz(Max 2GB)
Display: 15 XGA TFT LCD(1024×768 pixels 16.7 million colors @ 120 Hz)
Video Graphics & Memory: Integrated Graphics memory upto 128 Mb
Audio system with two built-in stereo speakers
Built-in microphone
Hard Disk: 40 Gb ATA-100
Optical Drive: DVD/CD-RW Combo drive
56K Fax/Modem
Ethernet 10/100 LAN
Battery Life: 1.5-hour battery life, 2.5-hour quick-charge, 3.5-hour charge-in-use

Layout And Design: The laptop comes with a Silver –Black layout and with its sleek design, it does appeal to most. The front panel boundaring the 15” TFT Screen, the Keypad & TouchPad comes in a unicolour black look which makes a perfect visual duo with the Silver Body of the laptop. The Touchpad with 4-way integrated scroll button is a nice addition. Four easy-launch buttons along with the Power button are placed above the keyboard layout on the right hand side and can be configured by the user to launch different Programs. The Headphones/speaker/line-out port are inconveniently placed on the front panel of the laptop, if they had been on one of the two sides it would really had been icing on the cake. The Power adapter is a 65 W AC adaptor and comes in a sporty black colour.

Performance: From the specs, it is clear that the laptop comes with a descent config and can handle Regular browsing, office works, viewing movies on DVD and some occasional gaming. The 15.0″ XGA color TFT LCD, 1024 x 768 pixel resolution takes a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz and is quite a treat to watch and have no dead pixels as supposed to be rumors with the Acer Entry level laptops. The hard-disk may be a downer for a few since it comes with a 40 Gb variant. The speakers are placed at the front panel, and give acceptable sound quality which is surprisingly better than in most other laptops, to say the least.

Gaming: I was infact surprised to see that even with the onboard meagre Sis760Gx Video Adapter having 64 Mb of shared memory from the system memory, Games like NFS Underground 2, Fifa2005 played almost fine even at a resolution of 1024×768 with low settings. When tried to work on these games with high settings on the same resolution, the game ran fine but there were some unusual jerks. So 800×600 resolution with high settings seems to be correct choice for playing these games. Even after more than two and a half hours of continuous gaming, the heat generated by the laptops were within acceptable limits.

On the Move: The Aspire 3002NLC fails miserably to be used on its batteries. The battery can barely manage to keep the notebook running for a little over an hour while watching movie DVD’s.

Final Thoughts: The Drivers bundled with the CD are fully working and have no issues with Windows XP Pro SP2 . All in all, this is a no-non sense laptop at a price tag of 33770/- Rs- {I’m from India}. An extra 256 Mb RAM Module would be an icing on the cake. The price tag is inclusive of a Acer Laptop Carry Case. If you ever dreamt of a laptop and planned to do all the things you did with your desktop PC at an affordable price, then the Acer Aspire 3002 is for you.

Pros:
(+) Kick A$$ Config to suffice most users
(+) Combo Drive in a Entry Level Notebook
(+) Killer Price Tag makes it a more viable option

Cons:
(-)Low battery Life
(-)So-so graphics adapter with shared system memory.
(-)Inconveniently placed Sound ports at the front panel

Other Pics
Sisoft System Summary Full

Your Views and Comments are as welcome as always

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2005 at 1:47 pm and is filed under Gizmoz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.