ACER Aspire V3 Battery |
Posted: October 15, 2014 |
I’m over the moon with happiness about the battery life. This Acer comes with a neat little ePowerManagement program which allows me to adjust things like the CPU speed, screen brightness, standby and hibernation times, and allows me to turn off various ports and features like firewire and the wireless card. You can make your own profiles, but the ones built in will fit my needs perfectly. When I’m on word processing mode which sets the CPU to medium, I can get about 3-5 hours out of it, depending on what I do. I can play less demanding games with this setting for a long period of time too. When on entertainment mode, which sets the CPU to high, I can get 2-3 hours life, again, depending on what I do. Playing high demanding games will give me less time than watching a DVD for example. Plug the laptop into a power outlet, and the power manager automatically flicks all settings to the maximum. I’m really happy at the battery life. I bought this through my employer for 815-pounds ($1,452.66 USD). Current market price is about 750-pounds ($1,336.80 USD). I did order this in May though so that would explain the discrepancy. But wait…there is more. I also got a 3 year collect & return warranty. Stunning? I also had a carry case, delivery and 5 games included. I felt this was an excellent deal; you are getting a lot for your money. Obviously I had the advantage my employer, but I still feel the current market price is very good. It is a wide computer, which Acer unfortunately hasn’t taken advantage of with a wider keyboard, but obviously this is to accommodate the widescreen. Though it is wide, it is very thin – just thicker than 2 CD cases when open, and about 3 when closed. This makes it look pretty swish compared to some budget notebooks.This is a 15.4″ WXGA CrystalBrite TFT. Decoded, it’s a widescreen shiny panel with a resolution of 1280800. It does, unfortunately have one dead pixel. Its stuck green when on dark backgrounds, which is something of a bother, though I am learning to live with it. From what I hear, this is just unfortunate for me, since most Acer systems have perfect screens. It is of course CrystalBrite, which is another variation on a marketing term for those very reflective panels that are in vogue. Having seen these panels in stores, I knew that these were really nice. When off, the screen is like a black mirror, which is handy for checking your hair. They are very reflective when on as well, but only when the panel is directly facing a light. Otherwise it seems like any other screen (or perhaps I’ve just grown used to it). If your primary work position is similar to this, you could have a bit of an issue, unless you learn to ignore the glare (you do with your TV right?). The resolution is fine, I have no need to go higher, though I guess if you need to do CAD or some other kind of visual editing, you may benefit. I find the widescreen is nice to use, 4:3 ratio panels now seem cramped in comparison. The combination of widescreen and CrystalBrite are another reason the 5021 looks a lot more expensive than it is. If you have never used a shiny type screen before, it is an amazing leap. Everything looks more defined and vivid; it makes standard screens look rather “vague” in my opinion. Over time, it becomes a standard feature, I personally forget it has the shiny coating unless I’m watching a movie, or playing a game. Both games and DVDs look stunning on this screen. One bugbear, which I’m presently in a quandary about though — whenever I play DVDs in fullscreen with Windows Media Player, it has substantial black borders on all sides. I can only think this is because the DVD lacks the resolution to be expanded to fullscreen, though I doubt this can be the real reason. The inbuilt Arcade DVD Player does play it fullscreen, but seemingly at a loss of quality over letterboxed. I am sure I will figure it out eventually, but it is something to bear in mind. The backlighting is extremely bright, on the highest setting in even a semi dark background, it hurts my eyes. It is pretty uniform across the screen, with no light leaks anywhere. It seems to be a good quality panel to me, though I’m no expert.
I personally prefer the spring action and smaller key travel of notebook keyboards, so this is great for me. The keyboard has some flex around the pressed key, especially on the upper left. The rest of the unit is fine. Only people who have a heavy hand will notice serious flex I assume. I find the key depression very nice; it is very easy to use if you are familiar with this smaller layout. I am somewhat confused by having dedicated $ and keys next to the direction arrows. I still find it faster to use shift & the appropriate key. Still, I suppose it’s better than having blank plastic there.There are hotkeys at the top to launch email, browser, power management and Acer. They are user definable to anything one would like, however I don’t tend to use these. Dedicated media buttons would have made for a better experience — especially a hardware volume control. You can adjust brightness and volume using the function key (fn) and the arrows. On the left, along the home/end keys, there are fn+ buttons for windows media player (fn+home is play/pause for example) so I guess the lack of hardware buttons isn’t too bad. Acer also includes a variety of “utilities”, its own Arcade multimedia player which can play pretty much any audio, video or photo you throw at it. It also has an interesting “Gridvista” system, which causes windows to snap to a predefined area of the screen. This basically means you get the best use of the real estate available, though it’s not something I often use. It is difficult to complain too much about such a well priced piece of hardware, so I won’t. However, I find the issue with the mouse buttons pretty frustrating. They are useable, but they are poorly designed and made. The only consolation is that this button type is generic to the whole Acer range, including the premium priced Ferrari models. At least I can glow in the satisfaction of those well-off owners cursing on the train as they click. Acer managed to strike gold in the middle of a global economic crisis thanks to their affordable Acer Aspire One netbooks. These low-cost, ultraportable laptops have quickly become popular travel companions for people who don’t want to haul a heavy notebook to Starbucks. The latest 10-inch Acer Aspire One, the D250 series, offers a great balance of features at a starting price of less than $300. Read on to find out more about the Acer Aspire One D250-1165. The Acer Aspire One D250-1165 is a low-cost version of the new D250 series netbooks and features a smaller battery and no Bluetooth in order to drop the retail price below $300. One very interesting item of note is that the D250 is actually slightly thinner than the original Acer Aspire One 150 series which used a smaller 8.9-inch screen. Like the original Aspire One, the D250 uses glossy plastics on the top of the screen cover as well as around the entire LCD. At times the reflective boarder does get on your nerves if you are in a brightly lit room with many sources of glare. The Synaptics touchpad used on the D250 is a little small considering that most 10-inch netbooks are getting larger touchpads these days. The touchpad is gesture-enabled and this allows you to use multi-finger gestures such as “pinching” your fingers together or “pulling” your fingers apart to zoom in or out. You can also use a spiral motion to activate the “chiral scroll” feature. The Synaptics control panel in Windows also allows you to customize these gestures as well. The touchpad surface provides smooth, fluid movement but the small size takes some getting used to. The left and right touchpad buttons are located beneath a single rocker-style button, but with no separation between the left and right side it’s easy to accidentally press the middle of the touchpad button when you’re trying to press the left or right side. The touchpad buttons have extremely shallow feedback, so it isn’t always easy to feel when you have or have not pressed a button. The D250 also includes a dedicated wireless on/off switch on the front of the notebook–something that’s nice to have when traveling and isn’t available on many netbooks from other manufacturers.There isn’t much to be said in the performance section of a netbook review. If you’ve read our reviews of other netbooks that use the Intel Atom processors then you know that all Atom-based netbooks have nearly identical performance in terms of actual real-world use. Overall performance with the Intel Atom platform is very reasonable for daily activities like Web browsing, email, using Microsoft Office, listening to music, and watching standard definition (480p) movies. If you’re in a bind you can even use photo editing software like Photoshop or GIMP for basic image editing.
Although the Acer Aspire One D250-1165 offers a great value for less than $300, I can’t help but feel a little less than impressed. Acer used a small keyboard, small touchpad, and worst of all a small battery on what is otherwise a fantastic netbook.Considering how crowded the netbook market has become over the last year I really expected Acer to deliver more with their 10-inch netbook. Yes, it costs less than $300, but that price looks less impressive when other netbooks have better keyboards, better touchpads, and MUCH better battery life for less than $400.As I’ve said before with netbooks, I’d like to see a higher resolution screen and better graphics solution, but when it comes to the Aspire One D250 I’d settle for a better keyboard, touchpad, and battery. Still, if you’re looking for a low-cost laptop to take with you to the coffee shop then the Acer Aspire One D250-1165 might prove to be a very good choice.This 15.6-inch notebook is priced below $600, has a design less than one inch thin and gets over five hours of battery life. What’s not to like? Build quality is average; there is limited chassis flex in the range of what we expect for consumer noteboooks. The lid flexes a bit too much; ripples appear on the back when pressure is applied from behind. Fit and finish is OK; the front corners could be more smoothly rounded off.Upgrade capabilities are limited to just the RAM; there’s an access panel on the bottom of the chassis. Upgrading anything else including the hard drive means taking most of the chassis apart, which is a shame. The V5-571′s battery is user-replaceable, which is a refreshing change from all the thin notebooks we’re seeing with sealed-in batteries. The V5-571 has all of its ports situated on the left side of the chassis, a disadvantage for left-handed users. There is the usual assortment of ports including a single USB 3.0 SuperSpeed port. There are no ports on the back on the notebook and the only port on the front edge is a media card reader. The image descriptions below are listed from left to right.There is a full size “Chiclet” style keyboard with a dedicated numeric keypad that isn’t all that enjoyable to type on. The tactile feedback needs to be more engaging; right now it doesn’t feel like anything but plastic. I had accuracy problems as well; there’s a chance the keystroke will not register if the keys aren’t fully depressed to the bottom of their travel. The 2/3 size keys of the numeric keypad take some getting used to. Keyboard backlighting is not available.
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