HowToFixComputers.com

nemisis_tfc · Forum Regular Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 26

Hi All

My first post on here and i thought i would write a review of this laptop as i could not find one when looking for it!

Looks 8/10

The laptop is predminatly silver with a black trim. The LCD bezel itself is polished or shiny black plastic. There are speaker connectors along the front side as well as a switch for bluetooth and wifi. The laptop looks good however i personally find that the contrast between dull black on the palmrest and the shiny black LCD makes either or look out of place, they would have been better sticking to one colour

Functionality 9/10

This laptop has almost anything you could need on it. connectors i have are as follows, 56k modem, 4 usb 2.0, DVI out, LAN, Svideo, RGB out, headphones, pcmcia and a card reader. Aslo included onboard are Bluetooth and wireless. This missing mark is for the non inclusion of infra red and also no option for a 3g or GSM card. trivial really

Features/specification 10/10

This one can be the most pointless part of any review as specs always change, however i am more than happy with this laptop.
the current spec is as follows

The core 2 duo cpu was the main reason for the upgrade, I find this laptop slightly slower than my single core 2ghz pentium M. this is apparently not the case in benchmarks however it is something i have noticed

The X1400 copes fairly well with games as well.

Gaming 6/10

The laptop is let down when gaming by both a short battery life as well as a stubborn screen or graphics card.

I have played dawn of war dark crusade on this machine as well as medieval 2 total war, both had to have fairly low settings but run acceptably well with very little jerking and no frame slowdowns

Neverwinter nights 2 however seems to be out of the grasp of this machine as i was forced to play at 800*600 which leads on to the next gripe

When attempting to play games outwith the standard native resolution of 1280*800 the screen makes you play in a windowed mode, this seems to seriously distort games like nwn2 and aoe3. overall not the ideal gaming system

Battery life 6/10

Having being used to the HP NC8230 the battery life on this seems incredibly short. realisticly you are looking at about 1 hour 45 mins. however acer does have a great little utility that lets you shut off components and i have managed to stretch to 2.5 hours if i can live with a very dull screen

Overall this laptop is still a decent buy. look to pay around £600 for it and you are onto a winner as a light gaming and mobile office machine. bluetooth is great for using your mobile to connect to the internet while out and about too!
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DCSE mobile dell engineer

Please note that i am a contract engineer, the views or opinions i express on this board are not that of dell computers LTD and no warranty is implied on any suggested fixes