Acer Aspire 5051 AWXMi after a year

I purchased my Aspire roughly a year ago, and was just now thinking how my opinion and general stance towards the machine has changed during these 12 months. So I did what every good bad blogger would, and decided to post a lengthy personal rant about the matter.

I’m not the kind of guy who needs to have the latest and greatest hardware, nor am I very particular about the brand of hardware that I’m buying. I’m more concerned with the cost-lifetime ratio of the items I’m buying. How much will I have to fork out, and how long can I be expected to reasonably tolerate the thing.
When I bought the laptop I’d been using a circa 1999-2002 Dell Latitude with worn out hinges, broken keyboard and absolutely no built-in connectivity, so I wanted to get a machine that wasn’t already completely out-dated – so I could actually use it for the years to come – but wasn’t looking for the 2000+ euro dream-machine, either.
The acer was on sale, obviously because new models were being rolled out, and I only had to spend a little under 500 euros for the thing, and a big plus was that it didn’t have Vista.

I didn’t do too much checking up before buying, but I hadn’t heard too many bad things about Acers before, so I figured the machine would probably be a solid piece of hardware. Later on I’ve found out that these particular Aspire models have troubles with hinges breaking after about a years worth of use, which is why I’ve tried to be gentle with them. I’m not too worried, though; AFAIK the wiring to the screen and the WLAN antenna through the hinges will most likely stay intact through the possible ordeal, so it will be easily salvageable if things happen to go sour.
Besides the possibly faulty hinges the only major complaint I’ve come across on the internet and in my own use is the fact that acer seems hell-bent on delivering the machine pre-configured for barely-literate bipedal humanoids with no former computer experience. The default XP Home installation boots up really slowly, due to all the “Empowering Technology” Acer has thrown in.
Empowering Technology is a series of applications developed by Acer that attempt to ease configuration tasks and managing back-ups, among other things. They also eat up a hefty piece of the already limited memory on the 512Mb-lappy, and put a very ugly Acer-widget on the desktop.
Until recently I only had one piece of software left from Empowering Technology: Acer ePower Management. It’s the tool that is used to change power profiles, enable or disable WLAN etc. A little over a month ago I finally got fed up with the thing (this was mostly due to the fact that all ET-programs use a custom skin, that is used to style all the windows, menus and controls. The skin seems to be a bit heavy on the CPU, as when I’m on battery with CPU scaling set to maximum battery life, the ePower context menu could take up to 10 seconds to actually display on screen) and installed AMDs own Power Monitor.

Enough about Empowering Technology. After the initial purchase I’ve not done any dramatic changes on the machine. I think I can list all out by heart if I really try:

• Uninstalled Symantec Internet Security
• Uninstalled Empowering Technology
• Repartitioned the hard disk to dual-boot Linux
• Installed a second 512Mb RAM unit
• Installed a 64bit Linux kernel to actually make use of the CPU
• Tore off all of the ugly stickers on the thing
• Slapped some stickers of my own on it

That’s about it, I guess. About the only reason I still have Windows on the thing is that the built-in Atheros WLAN adapter has trouble associating with the access points at our school and at my parents’ house, and I subscribe to a VOD service that uses NSV for it’s streams, and I haven’t yet found a player on Linux that would play all the streams properly.

A little more info about the machine, before I go into more detail about my experiences with it:

So it’s not a high-end machine by any standards, still has a modem, and possibly has faulty hinges. How have 12 months been with this bad-boy?

Well, for starters, the hinges are still very much intact, there is some pre-crack -style discoloration on the plastic, but it hasn’t cracked yet. What has broken, however, is one of the clips that hold the battery in place. The other one, the one with the spring, doesn’t have any wear on it, but the non-spring clip has broken off completely.
Also, all the little rubber "feet" on the bottom have fallen off, even after twice super-gluing them back on.
The machine has many creases and little holes on it, and all of these have filled up with dust and dirt, even with numerous vacuum treatments.
Some of the keys (namely N and X) have become somewhat unresponsive to the point that they need to be pressed considerably harder than other keys, even though I’m a pretty aggressive typist.
The power button is very unresponsive, and it’s little LED has really faded.
The screen has lost some of its backlight-power, and it has a 2cm x 15cm stripe of blue discoloration on it in the top left portion
The machine gets really hot if it’s on for longer than roughly an hour. It’s not just warm, but so hot, that using the touchpad actually becomes unpleasant, and somewhat painful. As with most laptops, it also can’t actually be used on the lap for very long, without risking scalding on the left thigh

That is absolutely everything that I can think of, that is wrong with the machine. Other than the heating up, all of these are pretty much just minor nuisances, and don’t hinder the use of the machine. I have to say that performance-wise I’ve been very happy with my purchase, although people who’ve seen me use my Acer would probably strongly protest on that, as I often become frustrated with Windows, and on such occasions I’ve been known to somewhat degrade the quality standards that I usually set for my speech (i.e. I cuss). All of my major troubles with the machine have been software-related, and the most major hardware annoyance has been those little rubber feet, that usually hold the machine in place, falling off.

So all in all, I’ve been very happy with my purchase during these 12 months, definitely to the extent that I think it was well worth the roughly 40e/month.
I’m currently planning on adding more memory, as the prices keep dropping, and possibly replacing the hard disk with a slightly smaller SSD, and possibly purchasing a second battery
In the future I hope to see suspend to disk support and someone developing a fully-working NSV-codec for Linux, so I could finally completely drop Windows, but until then, my dual-boot system will have to suffice.

For anyone planning on buying an Acer laptop, I suggest you check out what the interblag has to say about it first, and to take some of the more fanboyish complaints with a grain of salt, and most important of all, never EVER trust what Acer writes on their website :D