The Acer Guy

Bit off track but not that much.

Anybody know a good way (read: fast) of downloading Bit Torrent files? I am trying to download the episode of The Lab with Leo Laporte (168) in which he talks about TheAcerGuy.

Only problem is it’s taking DAYS……

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We have our first review for the Acer Aspire 8920.

I’m really excited about receiving these directly from you, and want to thank John Daniels for writing this up so soon after receiving his.

But that’s enough of me. Let me get out the way and let John tell you what his first few days have been like.

Acer Aspire 8920G-934G64Bn

Windows Vista® Ultimate”, Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9300 (2.5GHz, 800MHz FSB, 6MB L2 Cache), 18.4″” WUXGA Acer CineBrite™ LCD TFT, 2*2GB RAM, 2*320GB 5400rpm Hard Disk Drive, 2X Blu-ray Disc™/DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive, Mobile Intel® PM965 Express Chipset with NVIDIA® GeForce™ 9650M GS 512MB VRAM, Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN (dual-band quad-mode 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N), 8 cell Li-ion Battery, 6-in-1 card reader (SD™, MMC, MMCplus™, MS, MS PRO, xD), 0.3 MP Crystal Eye Webcam, Bluetooth 2.0, Acer Bio-Protection fingerprint solution, Dolby® Home Theatre Digital Surround Sound Technology, McAfee® Internet Security Suite 60 Day Trial”

The box contains the 8920, power supply, manual, guarantee & a Sony Blu-ray demo disk with various Blu-ray movie trailers on. I haven’t included any photos of the machine as there are plenty on the Internet & Acer can take better picture than I can, but here is the box.

After 6 years using 15” screens, it looked huge, with a very attractive outer styling; only problem with the gloss finish is it shows every fingerprint.

Set up was painless, Vista took about 10 minutes to complete its install, creating a system restore & a driver restore disk, was about 45 minutes, reinstallation of drivers can be completed via the Acer Mobility Center, directly from your hard drive, as can a restore to factory defaults through the Acer eRecovery management.

It came with Vista Ultimate 32 bit SP1, there were a few windows updates to get, which downloaded & installed in about 10 minutes, there was also an updated version of Acer Arcade Deluxe which was updated from within the program.

Build quality is excellent, a different league from my old Aspire 5110, it feels very solid, & with normal use, no noticeable give on the keyboard, which is positioned nearly central, with the numerical keypad on the right & CineDash Media console on the left. Touchpad is about central with the keyboard, positioned directly under & the same width as the space bar.

The screen is a beauty, my old Aspire’s screen looks positively dull in comparison; it can be viewed from a wide angle both horizontally & vertically. The huge width takes a bit of getting used to but I find myself using Acer GridVista a lot more now as it is ideal for this screen size. The included Blu-ray demo, has a couple of comparison clips showing you the benefit of HD, watching normal definition content will never be the same again.

CineDash Media console is a bit of a gimmick, & takes a bit of getting used to but it does what it says & looks pretty cool.

The 5.1 sound works, but this is a notebook, I’d have to be 2” tall & stand on the keyboard to get the benefit, & then I’d have to have eyes at the back of my head, as the front & rear speakers seem to be swapped. The Tuba Cinebass, adds a little bit of bass, nothing out of the ordinary, but all in, not a bad sound for a notebook & probably the best I’ve heard.

Performance.

Windows experience index is 5.1, with memory operations per second being the bottleneck

Windows shows 4gb of Ram, but Everest shows only 3gb is available. I was running Vista 64 bit on my previous aspire & the WEI for memory was 5.9, so it presumably it would be the same on this machine.

It would be nice if Acer supplied a 64 bit version, all the drivers available for download from support are 64 bit compatible except the Nvidia, which I’m not sure about.

Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce 9650M GS

I ran the following tests
3DMark 05 – 8009
3DMark 06 – 4814

It should be able to handle all current games, though not on fullest effects on games like Crysis.

Battery life on the power saver plan is about 2 hours 30 minutes as per the specifications.

Very good hard disk performance from the 2 Western Digital Scorpio wd3200’s, considering they are 5400rpm disks, I had a Hitachi 200gb 7200 in my old aspire & it got the same score, 5.3

The 2 physical disks appear as 3 partitions, there are also 2 hidden partitions, presumably for acer system restore. See below

There is an Intel Robson & Matrix Storage manager driver included, but no onboard Robson (TurboMemory) & the current BIOS doesn’t allow RAID (to my knowledge anyway, I’ll be contacting Acer support regarding that) so seems redundant to me.

Improvements I’d like to see would be Vista 64 bit operating system, internal TV card (included in the next model down) RAID & TurboMemory.

In conclusion, I’m happy with my purchase & consider the price very reasonable considering the specification.

Acer seems to have stepped up a notch in terms of quality & I think they will be onto a winner with this model. Now let’s see if they can do something about their technical support.

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Over the past year and a half, I have been on the receiving end of literally thousands of technical questions.

Believe it or not, I am not a technical guy. No I’m not kidding. I LOVE technology, but it doesn’t take much for it to leave me literally clueless. But Simone is, fortunately, and that means we are running an almost 100% success rate with everything you throw at us. I’m lucky to have him on board.

One of the things I have always wanted to do was a “DO THIS FIRST” guide. A sort of quick start checklist designed to make sure you’re never left with a dead machine.

I mentioned it to Simone and he was pretty enthusiastic too.

The result of that 5-minute chat over coffee was this intelligent list of things to do the moment you get your Acer out of the box.

This is a community. We’re here to share our experiences so if there’s something missing, please mention it in the comments. With a bit of luck, and with your help this guide could save thousands of pounds/dollars/euros in unnecessary repair bills…

So, without further ado, let’s start the ball rolling with a couple of things you need to do right now in order to make your Acer experience as smooth as possible:

1. Burn the Acer Factory backup onto a blank CD/DVD.

2. Install and Run an Antivirus program before you do anything else! – If you don’t have one yet, check out Norton Internet Security 2008.

3. Run Windows / Microsoft updates for both Windows and Office (Microsoft Update automatically downloads and installs updates for all Microsoft products on your computer). If you don’t have Office 2007 or if you don’t want it, first remove it and install the Office Productivity application you prefer and update with hotfix if available

4. Get to know the Acer eRecovery suite.

Of all the hundreds and thousands of Acer notebooks sold worldwide, I reckon somewhere around 99% do not use this life-saving software feature, and it’s built right into the computer!

What eRecovery does is to manage your software configuration, drivers and applications so that should something go wrong you can return your computer or single driver or single application to its original state in a couple of steps WITHOUT having to deal with Acer support.

So how does it work?

eRecovery restores the original content of your C: partition to the original Acer preload system with applications. You then have the option of burning this “Personal Backup” onto DVDs and use this to recover your machine instead of the Factory backup (which stores only the original Acer content).

With a Personal Backup, the eRecovery engine saves the content of your C: partition (for example Vista + Programs + all other content in this partition) into “hidden” files on D:
The advantage of eRecovery is that you can re-do your Personal Backup as many times as you like with any configuration, so that as you install more software, you can keep your “restore software” updated as well.

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 1
Every time you run this personal backup and save a new configuration, you overwrite the previous one. This means that the only way to store different backup versions is to burn them on DVDs each time you run eRecovery.

This way you can have different DVDs with different versions of Personal Backups and you can choose what to restore when you have to use it.

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 2
Of course the basic engine NEEDS to be the same, so this works ONLY if you have your original Acer preload working fine. eRecovery does not work if you delete / format the machine first!

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 3
eRecovery Personal Backup and eRecovery in general works only with content on the C: partition!

When Acer eRecovery restores the factory backup (default Acer preload) it re-writes ONLY the C: partition, all files on the D: partition are NOT touched in any way

When eRecovery runs the Personal backup it saves ONLY files on the C: partition, not on D: !!!
So if you have your Company backup file somewhere in D: this WILL BE NOT SAVED in the “Personal Backup”

WORD OF WARNING NUMBER 4
Nothing from the D: partition is saved with eRecovery but DO NOT SAVE EVERYTHING ONTO C: just to make sure that eRecovery Personal backup will save everything during the backup process. For personal files you should use another backup system.

Remember that the Acer Default Factory backup will generally require 1 or 2 DVDs, depending if Office 2007 is installed or not, so if you add more software you need more space to create the backup (on the D: partition) and more time to burn into many DVDs !!

It’s a vicious circle. The more you add on C: the more space you need on D: and the more DVDs you need to backup and the more time you need to restore everything…

The best way to do it is to separate your Operating System (Vista + programs) from your files. The Operating system and programs are on C: and are used to determine the back-up point with eRecovery. Your files can be stored on D: and backed up separately onto DVDs.

This way should you need to fully restore your computer you can use the eRecovery Personal Backup first (two DVDs = quick process), then restore all your files from another storage solution.

Got any more? Feel free to add your own and if they’re good enough, I’ll put them on the list.

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This time round I answer four questions:

1. What’s the Windows Experience Index?
2. What does a (real) DVD look like on the 8920?
3. What is the keyboard like?
4. How loud can it go?

Unfortunately I couldn’t get my hands on a VoIP Bluetooth phone or a 6920 but I’m still looking for them so this ain’t over just yet.

If you have any more questions I’m happy to go in there again and try and answer them. Just don’t make them too technical as a) these are sample models which means they are not full production spec and b) I’d rather YOU publish your own reviews once you’ve bought one…

Anyway, without further ado… here is the latest installment of the Gemstone Blue.

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Now that the event’s been and gone and the only thing all of you who really, really want one of these notebooks have to enjoy in the meantime are my frankly laughable videos, I thought I’d put up something that harnessed the collective wisdom and generosity of TheAcerGuy readers and kept you busy.

I want you to tell me (and everyone else) where and when the Gemstone Blue is available.

Officially it should hit the shelves mid-May…

With the original Gemstone 5920, this got really messy with me trying to coordinate your thoughts with official Acer info but I’ve learned my lesson and this time round I’ll leave it up to you.

This post, then, is for you to signal places where the Gemstone Blue is available (on or off-line). No affiliate links please, just good old-fashioned detective work.

In your replies, please indicate both country as well as the name (and link) of the business. I ask this as requests have been coming in from all over the world and it’ll help readers zone in on relevant answers.

You can also discuss spec differences if there are any. Don’t know if there’s a single, global spec sheet but it’s very unlikely because as I’ve mentioned before, country managers order what their clients (distributors/retailers) think you’ll want to buy so the specs are occasionally very different from one country to the next.

So, the search is on. Where’s it at?

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Well this is fun.

Didn’t think anyone would have bothered looking at that last one but you did and like all the best laid plans, I left some stuff out…

So yesterday I went back there to finish what I started. At least for now.

Any guesses about the music?

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This is a bit of a giggle really. Don’t take it too seriously.

I promise I’ll do better in future.

Anyway, the other day I was looking for videos of the Gemstone Blue to post here. I mean my Google alerts have been firing off a couple of times a day ever since the launch event but apart from articles based on stuff I wrote, there’s very little to actually look at.

So I went out an made my own.

OK, I know it’s an awful video - the lighting is terrible and this one was a prototype so the specs were all wrong but I had fun making it and that’s all that counts isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Who knows if they’ll let me back in to make more.

Whatever. Enjoy!

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