So I’ve wanted a laptop for some time now. Like most things I want, I didn’t want to actually buy it so I have been putting it off for about a year now. This year at school I am taking some security classes that are in an airgapped room. The catch is that you can get the school’s wifi in the room if you bring your own equipment (and promise not to plug it in to the room’s network on pain of failure of all classes that use the security lab).

A few weeks ago I picked up a $1200 HP. I was planning on using it as my full time computer as it was more powerful (I thought) than my existing machine (c2d, 4gb, 9600m gt). Well apparently I failed at reading reviews/benchmarks or they lied to me, as the 9600m gt barely outperformed my 7900gs (17 points on 3dmark06). On top of that I was having some strange issues with the sound and the “media buttons” (which are really like a touchpad of some sort) acting oddly. Since HP offers full money back guarantees (and pays return shipping, and shipping to me was free) back to HP it went, quite painlessly. Even though I wasn’t sold on their product, their return policy is pretty damn nice.

About a week ago, a buddy linked me to a slickdeals post about the Acer Extensa 4420-5963. $399 at Best Buy.

Specs

Acer Extensa 4420

• AMD Athlon64 x2 TK-57 (1.9ghz, 2x256kb l2 cache)
• 2gb ddr2-667
• 160gb 5400rpm HDD
• DVD-burner
• ATI Xpress 1250
• 14.1″ 1280×800 glossy display
• Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Not the latest and certainly not the greatest, but seems like a solid deal for the money. I went ahead and picked one up. So far I’m pretty happy with it. Performance is as expected, it’s no gaming machine like the HP would have been, but the price point settles that issue.

Some Positives

The keyboard and touchpad feel good to me. The keyboard is curved a bit as well. I’m assuming this is supposed to make it a bit more ergonomic but it doesn’t seem enough to even be noticed. This could be good or bad depending on whether or not you care. The display looks good. I watched a short section of Superbad on it the other day and didn’t have any complaints.

Overall, it is light enough that it’s really no burden at all to carry along with the other things I take to class. I ride a bike (05 Suzuki GSXR-600) to class regularly, so carrying a lot of weight on my back is rather annoying.

The biggest positive really is the price. At this level of laptop, you are really just trying to eeck out “good enough” for the smallest price you can and this laptop does that for me.

Some Negatives

Dollar and Euro keys surrounding the up arrow key. This is odd as hell and I occasionally hit the Euro key when I’m going for the up arrow. I can’t say I’ve ever seen this feature on any keyboard I have used.

The placement of the usb ports leaves some to be desired. Two on the right, one on the front, one on the left side. There is one on the front, which seemed odd at first, but actually works out ok for plugging in thumb drives quickly. My problem is that I carry a wired usb mouse with me. The plugs on the right side are towards the front (basically right below the “$” and left arrow keys. This puts the mouse cord right in the area where I want to be mousing. Not enough for me to stop using the mouse, but I’d have located them elsewhere if it was up to me. The IEEE 1394 (that’s firewire for you Mac folk) port is also on the front. While I don’t see myself ever actually using it, if you wanted to plug an external drive in, it seems like a bad location for the port.

Battery life is a little weak in my opinion. I haven’t extensively tested it, but it seems like about 2-3 hours depending on what you are doing and screen brightness. This doesn’t really effect me though, as the places I primarily use it have power within reach, so I can easily plug it in if I’m running low. This brings me to my next complaint.

Comes with a 32-bit version of Vista. Why?

One thing that annoys the hell out of me, though other people seem to think it’s no big deal, is that it beeps when you plug or unplug the AC adapter. Why, oh why would you ever want this feature? Once you are booted into an OS, it does respect the volume or mute settings, but if you plug in while it’s booting, expect a loud beep.

Crapware Package

Any name brand computer comes stuffed with a bunch of crap you don’t want or need and just have to get rid of as soon as possible. I was actually pretty surprised at the relatively small amount of extra cruft that came with the machine. McAfee AV, some links to NetZero, 60 day Office trial, some Microsoft contacts software (which requires MS SQL 05), and the Acer backup/recovery tools (I left these alone for the time being as I haven’t burned the backup discs yet). Overall, it took a short and relatively painless (everything uninstalled cleanly, and the NetZero links I just deleted) process to get rid of it.

Conclusion

Although my negatives section is a few times the length of the positives section, I’m honestly happy with the purchase (I can come up with problems with anything all day, ask Nick). I was mulling over getting a subcompact (was looking at the new Dell minis) which were in the same price range as this Acer. In the end I decided that the bigger size was worth it for the considerably greater storage and power. I can easily run a few VM’s in VMware Workstation simultaneously while browsing the web for tutorials/info, which is nice for the classwork I need to do.