Cheap Acer Laptop
The Extensa 5220-100508 is a cheap Acer laptop that offers good specs for a relatively low price. This is not an ideal desktop replacement except if you are a looking for a mainstream laptop that will help you get your office work done.
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Even if at this time the dual core laptops are the most demanded ones on the market because they are faster and they allow multiple tasking without freezing the laptop, the Acer Extensa 5220 has only one core, a simple processor which is still capable of helping you get things done. The design is elegant but some may consider all that black to be rather boring. Even if it’s made of plastics, the durability of this laptop is not questionable in any way. It can surely resist to small shocks and a lot of carrying around. Speaking of carrying around, this laptop is not quite light as it weights almost 3 kilos. However, this is a very good laptop for office work. The hinges seem to keep the 15.4 inch display in any desired position and there is no wobble. Even if we said that this laptop is durable, beware of any sharp object you put in the bag together with the laptop because the lid will scratch really easy. Unfortunately there is no webcam and this is weird considering the fact the webcams have become such a common feature for laptop they are almost like USB ports. Overall, the quality of this laptop is not questionable in matter of design and durability.
On the left side of the keyboard you will find 7 special keys which will come in handy for running fast some applications like opening the e-mail client or the web browser. The keyboard is a bit curved and if you look at it from above it looks like it’s smiling to us. The layout of the keyboard should not be a problem when typing as it is very easy to get used to the “smile” pattern. The keys are ok and they offer positive feedback when you type without making any disturbing noise. The touchpad is also pleasant to use. You have separate left and right mouse buttons and between them you have a special button which has arrows on all four sides and it is used for scrolling. That’s right, then you are reading a big document, all you have to do is press the bottom part of that button and the text will move in that direction. You also have left and right arrow keys for horizontal scrolling. The processor is an Intel Celeron M 540 which operates at a speed of 1.86 GHz. You have a standard 512 MB of RAM which is upgradable to a maximum of 2 GB. The graphics card is a Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 with 128 MB of dedicated video memory which is very weak in comparison with other graphic cards available on the market. However, this is not a problem as we have already established that this laptop is not any gaming machine.
You have 80 GB of free disk space. As the for the ports and connections you get 4 USB ports, one PC-Card, one Express Card 54mm, a Firewire port, one VGA out, one S-Video, a modem, an infrared feature, one Kensington Lock, a 4-in-1 card reader, the Ethernet port plus the regular headphones and microphone jack. The recommended operating system for this laptop is the Windows XP running on 32 bits. You also have a DVD burner but no integrated Bluetooth.
We liked the fact that the Acer Extensa 5220 has a matte display rather than a glossy one that reflect everything in front of it. The colors are ok, even illumination and contrast are nothing to complain about. This laptop has some pretty good features and works extremely well considering that it only costs around $500. Like we said, it’s a cheap Acer laptop but it offers quite a lot for its price. One big disadvantage of this laptop is the fact that the processor is very weak and rather slow and you only get 512 MB of RAM. This means you can’t run any fancy applications that require a lot of memory and if you wish to run some multiple tasks, be careful as the speed of the processor will slow down. If you are not picky about your laptop and you just want to use it to surf the internet and do some office works done, this is just the right laptop for you. You can even watch a good movie or listen to some music and even play some mainstream games. But that’s about everything you can do with this laptop. However, it would be wise to upgrade the RAM to at least 1 GB and then you will see improvement as far as speed is concerned.
The Intel GMA X3100 will not help you with any serious gaming but it will come in handy for simple multimedia applications. If you want to play games, you’ll have to go with old ones that don’t require high video performance. 3D applications are also out of the question. Even if the fan of this laptop is always up and running, the noise is not disturbing at all. In fact, if you should use this laptop at office where there already is some background noise, you won’t hear it at all. There are no troubles with overheating as this laptop stays at normal temperatures and will only increase a bit above the room’s temperature but only after considerable hours of use. However, if you use this laptop in bed and place it on the sheets or blanket, there is a big chance the air vent will be blocked and then you will be dealing with temperatures that could fry an egg (and I’m speaking out of personal experience).
2 hours of battery life should be enough even if there are similar laptops which can provide better battery life. Overall, this is a laptop we recommend you use at home or at the office, as close as you can to a power outlet. In conclusion, I believe it’s fair to say that this laptop offers good specs for the money you pay.
