ACER ASPIRE 5520 REVIEW

Introduction
This is a good laptop from Acer with a good design and good features, let’s take a closer look.

Design
The design for the Acer Aspire 5520 is nice with a matte black color, curved angles and couple of sharp lines. The case dimensions are 426x366x274 mm, and weight is 2.75kg. The screen opening mechanism is a little bit annoying because you need to hands to open and close the laptop simply because it is so stiff and when you are closing the screen the mechanism doesn’t always lock it. The laptop could also been just a little bit thinner but overall it looks good in my eyes. The speakers, keyboard and touchpad are made in good quality here and seem to be solid overall.

The machine comes with many good features you will get facilities like Ethernet, Wireless, modem, 4 USB connectors, ExpressCard 54 slot, D-Sub output for the monitor, S-Video out, SPDIF, FireWire, integrated mic, headphone out, mic in, audio out, 5 in 1 card reader, 1.3 MP webcam etc.

Performance
This model comes with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 mobile TK-53 processor running at 1.7 GHz with Nvidia’s GeFroce 7000M graphic card. The performance is not that much to brag about ob this machine and you will not be able to play many games simply because the graphic card is not strong enough. You also get 1 GB ram which is not enough to run Windows Vista so if you plan on getting this laptop you should stick to Windows XP. On PCMarks we got a score of 2821 points, if this laptop only had a little bit stronger graphic card the performance would have been a lot better overall. However the 160 GB hard drive will be able to store most of your files so the storage place is good. The screen is simply a 15-incher running on a 1280x800 resolution. The screen is good overall with and the viewing angels are good. The battery life lasted a little bit over 2 hours. 2 hours and 10 minutes to be exact, this is average for a laptop in this price class and quite acceptable.

Conclusion
This machine is good as a freshman laptop but not recommended for the gamers. The hardware in the laptop is great all except from the poor graphic card. You will not be able to run Windows Vista good on this machine so I recommend running Windows XP. However this machine works great if you just want to surf the internet and, work and don’t play to many high-end games.

Pros
+ Good performance except from the graphic card
+ Good features and connection facilities

Cons
- Poor graphic card
- Slow with Windows Vista

Value For Money

Our Rating