Acer Aspire AS3003LCi Notebook (1.8GHz Sempron 3000+, 256MB DDR, 40GB, DVD/CD-RW Combo, Windows XP, 15

Reviewed by: mikezzzz

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Flawless out-of-box operation. WinXP recovery CDs are included. Standby and hibernate work fine. Efforless wireless setup - works great. Ditto wired networking. No promo software installed.

Weaknesses: Big for a 15" unit - possible issue for airplane use or schlepping around; needed updated driver to use scroller with Firefox; no slipcase included; skimpy printed docs.

Overall Evaluation: I'm quite satisfied with this machine. Here are some items that haven't been discussed. The hard drive is partitioned into two equi-sized FAT32 partitions - C: holds the whole Windows install while D: is used for Norton Ghost (cut down version included - nice) backup/recovery (launched with alt-F10 at boot time). There's plenty of room on D: for data, however. Apparently you can convert C: to NTFS but are warned that converting D: will disable Ghost. 64M of RAM are initially allocated to video. You can free up 32M of this in the BIOS (F2 on boot up) with no obvious video degradation. (Probably only an issue if you stick with the standard 256M. Adding another 256M significantly reduces application load times.) WindowsXP included no updates since SP2 so plan on doing some downloading. Regarding unit size, note the promotional photo used is incorrect. The real left and right screen margins are about 1", which is more than depicted.