Acer Aspire 5130

Beefy chassis made out of dark grey plastics looks robust and relatively satisfying. Cover is made out of shiny dark blue plastics with decent firmness. In upper segment cover is dark blue and in lower is black. Keyboard is among the best in this test with nice keystroke. Key layout is good with important keys that are big. Among left side there are 5 additional buttons. First one is for Acer Arcade DeLuxe application, second is for wireless adapter, third and fourth for volume control and fifth for Bluetooth adapter. Above those is semitransparent “e” button for activating Empowering Technology (set of useful applications). Display is also among the best in this group. Picture is sharp, very light even when lighting is set to minimum. Webcam is also very good.

As far as performance levels goes, Aspire 5230-602G25Mn is typical representative of AMD Puma platform. This means that it is universal but doesn’t stand out in any category. It gets warm in left bottom segment which won’t bother you too much.

The fact that Aspire 5230 has only 2 USB ports was unpleasant surprise. Also we didn’t like absence of DVI or HDMI connectors. On the other side we were pleasantly surprised when we saw that this notebook is delivered with Windows Vista Home Premium OS.

Acer Aspire 5737Z

Similar to previous model, Aspire 5737Z has black cover and display frame in piano finish, while keyboard and chassis is made out of dark grey plastics. Firmness of cover is average and in the middle bends significantly.  Display proportions are adapted for movie watching (16:9) so it has unusual diagonal of 15.6inch. Picture quality is slightly better than average. Keyboard has numeric pad. Keyboard is firm and very much like the keyboard on previous model. It looks like Acer finally figured out what are customers’ complaints all about in most cases. Above keyboard are two groups of additional buttons. In upper group are buttons for volume control, and in other for Bluetooth, wireless adapter, mail application and one customizable button. Above those is mash that hides and protects speakers. On the right side are present two USB ports, and on the front side is present card reader while all other connectors are located on the left side.

Touchpad is seemingly incorporated into rest of the chassis and palm rest. This touch pad supports Multi-gesture technology, and besides zoom function, it also has Circular-motion scroll that allows you to scroll very long pages simply by making circular motion on the surface of the touch-pad. Very nice option and very useful. Touchpad buttons are made as one big button that operates as rocker button. Despite the fact that it looks good we didn’t like how it operates because neutral segment of this button (in the middle) is very wide, so user actually needs to press its endings. Speakers are above average and this model has S/PDIF connector. Aspire 5737Z doesn’t have modem neither Express card slot which came as surprise to us.

When it comes to basic components Aspire 5737Z has few trumps, above all graphics card NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (fastest integrated graphics card at this moment). Monitoring shows that this card is heating up nicely but obviously, used cooling system is doing its job very well since we didn’t manage to locate graphics card by its heat dissipation. Totally unexpected this model used DDR3 memory, that besides good performances also has lower power consumption. Also graphics card can put to good use some of that DDR3 memory. This notebook comes without operating system, but on DVD we found drivers for XP and Vista.