Laptop-Review.eu

While set to be phased out and ”replaced” by a notebook from the Timeline series, the Acer 751 netbook from the Aspire One series nevertheless has some interesting features that sets it apart from other netbooks, such as an unusually large 11.6 inch display running an HD resolution. We take a closer look to determine what else it has to offer and whether it can meet the needs of the average student.

The product was kindly lent to us by Acer

Specifications

Category
Netbook

Processor
Intel Atom Z520 / 1.33 GHz

Chipset
Mobile Intel US15W Express Chipset

RAM
1 GB DDR2 SODIMM

Storage
160 GB HDD

Display
11.6" HD 1366 x 768 (WXGA) high-brightness, Acer CrystalBrite LED-backlit TFT LCD, 16:9 Format

Sound card & speakers
High-definition audio support
Two built-in stereo speakers
MS-Sound compatible

GPU
Intel GMA 500  

Battery
48.8 W 4400 mAh 6-celled lithium-ion battery (Li-Ion)   

I/Os
3x USB 2.0 ports
1x VGA port
1x RJ45 Ethernet port
1x microphone-in
1x headphone-out
1x Card reader: 3-in-1 card reader, supports SD, MMC, MS
1x 0.3MP Webcam

Wireless connectivity
Built-in 10/100 LAN
Built-in 802.11 Wireless b/g

Dimensions
28.4 cm x 19.8 cm x 2.5 cm
About 1.35 kg including battery

Support
Support is available via Acer

Warranty
1 year

Operating system
Windows XP Home

Software included
Acer eRecovery Management
Acer Launch Manager
Adobe Reader
McAfee Internet Security Suite
Microsoft Office 60-day Trial

Price
About £330.00 including VAT.

Package contents

The package includes a warranty certificate, a manual for the computer and an AC adapter (small with a long wire, goes perfect with the whole mobility theme netbooks sport by default).



Included
- AC adapter
- Manuals and warranty certificate

Physical aspects

First impression




A question I was personally interested in answering was whether an 11.6 inch netbook was preferable to a 10.1 incher. Many probably feel a netbook is something you bring with you on the go, and many probably have a desktop or primary notebook at home. With that in mind, a netbook should be as small and mobile as possible (within limits, of course).

The Acer Aspire One 751 has just the right size. The 11.6” display on this model is wonderful; small enough so as not to get too heavy and unwieldy, but still large enough for comfortable viewing, especially with that lovely resolution.




It is actually a fairly good-looking computer. The reviewed model was white, very modern, and very pleasing to the eye. The netbook itself is streamlined and easy to look at, giving you a really good “netbook feeling”. For once it is not too covered in annoying Acer stickers. All in all, it exudes elegance and style.





It is of course primarily cast in plastic, most of it smooth without any texture. It is not glossy, however, so you do not get the fingerprint problem, except for just around the display. It does not feel too cheap which is good – of course plastic is plastic and that is that, but at least it does not come off as a low-budget, low-quality product; far from it.




It has all the right proportions; a large keyboard, a sizeable trackpad and big display. Acer really seems to have made some good choices regarding design and content.
The hinges are made of plastic and are sufficiently strong, as on all other Acer laptops, and they blend in well with the design. At the rear the battery sticks out a bit – such is the price for a large battery in a netbook, though you cannot but love the long battery life.

The lid



The lid is pretty thin and looks quite elegant – here you can personalize your netbook by picking the colour you prefer, which will feature primarily on the lid and bottom of the netbook.
Acer’s logo prides the lid and you can find the words Aspire One on the inside, blending in well with the rest of the netbook.
The quality of the lid seems pretty solid; it clamps up the computer snugly, again giving you a feeling that you invested in a quality product.



There is also an integrated 0.3MP webcam and microphone on the inside of the lid.

The front



At the front are two switches for the display. Other than those there is little of interest, except to see how thin it is.

The rear



The lid slides down the rear when you open up the netbook. The battery also sticks out slightly.

The bottom



The bottom is where you insert/remove the battery and SIM card if you bought this netbook for mobile internet purposes.

The right side



The left side



Overview



Not a whole lot of surprises here; standard I/Os really, but it is very nice to have a card reader that works with your camera.

Diodes





The diodes are colour coded, with for example Bluetooth as blue. Most are green though and located by the power button. The rest are down in the left corner, where you can see WiFi and Bluetooth, among others. The power button also has a diode so you can find it in the dark.

Keyboard and touchpad




That such a small computer can have such a comfortable keyboard is no less than awesome. All the keys have been given enough space and are actually quite large, large enough for writing notes, assignments and general surfing.

The touchpad is of adequate size and works well enough, but it has a tendency to be oversensitive now and then. The mouse button is fairly hard, so you have to use a little bit of force to click it. I find that rather nice, as it reduces unintentional clicks. Still, I would always prefer to buy a small mouse to use instead of the touchpad – if nothing else, it is a good deal faster.

Display



For a netbook it sports a nice, big display with a great resolution. The display is 11.6 inches large and can run a resolution of up to 1366 x 768 px, which is great for surfing the web. The display is very crisp, but it is of the glossy type so you are bound to experience some glare issues.

The colours are good, very vivid, sometimes too good, meaning they try too hard to reproduce colours.



As a new part of our reviews we now test displays for pixel errors and faults in the backlighting, using a program called MonitorTest. It works by, for example, blackening the entire display which will expose pixel errors, i.e. areas that do not change colour. This will also allow you to see if the backlighting is uneven.

The display has an even backlighting and seems free of any pixel errors. There are no dead pixels or any other faults, so it appears to be a well-made model.

Sound and speakers

The aural aspect is still a bit ”netbook-y”. For a netbook the audio is decent, good enough for basic needs, but it cannot play very loudly. While it provides some of the best sound of all the netbooks I have had my hands on, I would still recommend a good pair of headphones or speakers if you want to enjoy music on it.

Noise, heat and power consumption

It is a very quiet netbook, so you can leave it running to your heart’s content without it getting annoying. That also makes it well-suited for student use as it will not interrupt a lecture with its noise.
Unfortunately it gets very hot at the bottom when you sit with it. You are thus better off leaving it on a table or you might burn your thighs a little.

I expect the power consumption to be fairly low; the battery should last a while and if you need it to last longer, you can always activate the power saving function.

Benchmark

All benchmarks were run at highest performance settings on the laptops. All other settings were left unchanged.

Windows Vista Experience Index

Since the computer comes with XP pre-installed, no WEI is available.

I have decided to pit the Acer 751 against an HP model in a higher price range, although with superior hardware. That should provide a good idea about what you actually get for your money.

The HP Mini Vivienne Tam Edition model had the following specifications:

Specifications

Category
Students, design-conscious individuals, surfers.

Processor
Intel® Atom™ processor N270, 1.60 GHz

Chipset
Intel® 945GSE Chipset

RAM
Supports up to 1 GB DDR2-memory

Storage
SATA-HDD 80 GB, 4200 RPM

Display
10.1” WSVGA HP LED Brightview Infinity widescreen

Sound card & speakers
3D Sound Blaster Pro-compatible sound 16 bit integrated
Generic stereo
Webcam with integrated microphone

GPU
Shared

Battery
3-celled lithium-ion battery (Li-Ion)

I/Os
2x USB 2.0
1x RJ45 (Ethernet LAN)
2x audio in- and out jacks
1x 2-in-1 card reader, supports SD/MMC

Wireless connectivity
802.11b/g WLAN
Bluetooth®

Dimensions
26.17 cm (W) x 16.67 cm (D) x 2.52 cm (H)
1.02 kg including battery

Operating system
Original Windows® XP Home Service Pack 3 (32-bit)

Price
About £425.00 including VAT.

Boot times and out of standby:





Boot and out of standby times are measured from when the power button is pressed and the Windows desktop appears.

As can be seen the Acer takes a little longer to start up. It does get out of standby very quickly though, which is perfect for students and the like when you go from room to room.

Battery life:



Idle times are measured at the lowest power profile on the tested models while Classic times are tested at the highest performance profile. Both are tested with BatteryEater 2005 to find the maximum battery life at the given settings.

Acer really gives you your money’s worth here. The HP disappoints hugely however, especially when you consider a netbook is made to be mobile. Nice that Acer prioritized battery life so highly on this model.

The processor:

SuperPi



Super Pi calculates the number Pi with 1 million decimals. The result is a time in seconds, meaning that the lower the number, the better. This can be used for direct comparison with other laptops that have run the same test.

Both processors perform sort of middling in this test, but well enough for netbooks in any case. You will not notice much of a difference between the two outside benchmarks.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic





SiSoft Sandra’s Whetstone and Drystone benchmark tests the processor’s ability to do pure number crunching, which occurs during gaming or different forms of picture editing. The measure is in Mflops (Millions Floating Point Operations Per Second) – the higher, the better.

Here the Acer falls short, but the HP does have a faster processor.

SiSoft Sandra CPU Multimedia





The multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra is calculated on a 2D figure. The output (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, i.e. the bigger the better.

Once again the HP wins, very much in line with the results in the previous test. Keep in mind the significant price difference though – the HP costs 33% more than the Acer, if not more.

RAM - SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth:





Sisoft Sandra’s Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the speed of the RAM – the higher the value, the better.

I am surprised the difference is so large here...I expected Acer’s RAM to perform better, but it is far behind.

Hard drive performance - SiSoft Sandra Harddisk Read:



Sisoft Sandra’s hard drive test module is used to measure the performance of the hard drive. Sisoft Sandra runs a number of tests on the surface of the hard drive and calculates the average reading speed.

Here the HP falls short; Acer’s hard drive reads data almost twice as fast, which is always good.

GPU performance - 3Dmark





The 3Dmark tests show the performance in DirectX 9, and paint a picture of the performance in newer games and applications. No tests have been run in DirectX 10.1 (which both cards support).

One will have to expect more from the HP when it comes to graphics, and that is reflected in the test. Still, netbooks are never good for more graphically demanding tasks – such are better left to bigger and more powerful notebooks.

Overall performance



The PCMark 05 results can be compared directly with other laptops that have run the same PCMark version. The program produces a score from a test that includes the performance of the processor, RAM, hard drive, GPU, etc.

Neither of the two netbooks is capable of running PCMark05 due to lack of codecs and other things. Judging by the tests above though, I would say the HP should score slightly higher than the Acer.

OpenOffice test

Since we have tested several laptops which are so well-suited for student use, I have decided to run some tests in OpenOffice (freeware which has the same functions as Microsoft’s Office bundle).

Here are some load times to give you a bit of insight into how quickly the computer loads a standard application like OpenOffice. Most can compare it with the PCs they normally work on.

Time to start up: 11 seconds
Load of browser (IE): 5 seconds

Conclusion
With the 751, Acer gives us a product that definitely falls in the good end of the price range. The product is relatively cheap; most students and travelers should be able to fit it into their budget. The focus is on students in particular, as jotting down notes electronically on such a small gadget is immensely practical.

So what can it actually do? Pretty much the basics. The benchmarks results are not impressive – they never are with netbooks – but fine for a netbook and certainly one at such a low price. It can run standard applications with ease, but will fall short when it comes to more demanding tasks. On the plus side you get a great display with a matching resolution, and a weight that does not discourage you from bringing it with you.

A product like this expects its user to primarily surf, listen to music, maybe watch a movie, and work with word processing and lighter graphics like PowerPoint. This is also why the Aspire 751 is aimed at students.

The computer froze up for a bit every thirty minutes or so, but that may just have been an isolated incident or perhaps the result of a previous reviewer’s tinkering.
The major advantages of this product are the size of the keyboard and, above else, the battery life. Only rarely will you have to bring an AC adapter with you. It can go beyond 4 hours at continuous use, so there is obviously a lot more for partial use. Once again, Acer have really delivered and showed us all the meaning of a long battery life.

I am slightly annoyed at all the heat it evolves – that does not seem to be Acer’s work. Okay, you will often have a table to rest the computer on, but I still think they could have come up with a better cooling solution. The touchpad might also get annoying after a while.

All in all it is an average product for standard use at a very good price, with the added bonus of a long battery life and lovely display.

Pros:
- Display
- Noise
- Price
- Audio
- Weight
- Battery life

Cons:
- Performance (standard as it is)

Battery: 5 / 5Graphics: 2,5 / 5Construction: 4 / 5Mobility: 5 / 5Software: 3,5 / 5Overall: 3,5 / 5