Notebook Critic

Every year as back to school season approaches Best Buy teases consumers into their stores with loss leader notebooks. Usually they sell out pretty fast. It probably isn’t the typical PC users that buy them, but rather tweakers who are looking for a decent kit to experiment with. What kind of experiments? Linux distributions and other hacked OSes.

I thought it would be cool to pick one up when my monthly Best Buy Credit Card statement arrived with a ‘$50 off any notebook’ coupon attached. This years Best Buy attention grabber is priced at $399 CDN ($349 after coupon).

What does $350 get you these days?

• Celeron M550 2 GHz CPU
• Intel Santa Rosa chipset with GMA X3100
• 1024 of DDR2 at 667MHz
• 120 GB Hitachi 5400 RPM HDD
• Pioneer DL DVD Multi recorder
• 802.11g and Gigabyte Ethernet
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• 6 cell 4000 mAh battery

Not a bad specification at all. Just a short time ago these components would have been fit for a premium rig.

Out of the Box

Acer ships the 5220 in a nondescript box. Inside you will find the battery, AC adapter, a large printed manual and no recovery discs. Make sure you burn a recovery set as soon as you start up.

Speaking of start-up, this particular Acer would not start. It would not even post. Suspecting an unseated Sodimm, I popped off the access cover. It turned out that one of the two 512 MB sticks was actually faulty. Not a great way to start my experience with the 5220.

While I had the notebook open, I noticed that the CPU is fact socketed. The 5220’s Socket P will accept any one of a multitude of CPUs (Merom and Penryn based). Unlike some recent budget notebooks based on Intel’s Santa Rosa platform, the 5220 only has one miniPCI slot.

Once the RAM situation was sorted out I booted with 512 MB. Vista first boot rendered the notebook unusable for about the first hour. With 1024 MB of RAM installed the first boot experience on a sunsequent install was much better.

Performance

Starting with the CPU, the Celeron M 550 is based on Intel’s Merom architecture (standard-voltage, 65 nm). Merom is the previous generation of Intel’s Core microarchitecture. It supports: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, Intel 64 (Intel’s x86-64 implementation), XD bit (an NX bit implementation). With 2 GHz clock speed and 1024 KB of level 2 cache performance is inline with the Pentium M 760 CPU of yesteryear except the Celeron has the added benefit of SSE3, SSSE3 and Intel 64. Not too shabby.

Acer’s slightly curved keyboard is flex free and quiet. Keys have a stiff dampened feel. The quality is not far from Lenovo and Dell’s best. Acer gave the 5220 a small touch pad. It does not quite fit the dimensions of the notebook but works fine. The Apple approach to touch pad design whereby a sizable pad matches the aspect ratio of the screen makes a lot of sense.

Wireless performance is terrific. The 5520 finds lots of networks and holds a signal well, but this is true of almost every notebook these days. Good WiFi performance is a minimum expectation. I don’t know that Acer’s SignalUp antenna is anything more than a marketing label at this point. The Broadcom BCM4312 WiFi chip presents a challenge when installing an OS. A clean Vista install did not recognize the chip, and Acer did not have a driver posted on their site. Further, both Ubuntu and Fedora failed to recognize the card.

Battery life is low. At approximately 2 hours one wonders where all the juice is going, this is after all a single core CPU with enhanced speed step. The remaining components are not power eaters. Taking a closer look at the battery reveals a possible culprit; the 6 cell battery is only rated 4000 mAh. This is about 20% less than a typical 6 cell battery. So, Acer has equipped the 5220 with a battery consisting of 6 very small cells.

Heat is a non-issue. The Acer 5220 generates very little heat when plugged in and almost nothing when on battery. Considering the heat given off by some of the dual core notebooks I have reviewed lately, this is a real treat. Fan noise is reasonable and is only noticable on the ‘high performance’ power profile.

Poor battery life is not the 5220’s only portability issue, it could benefit from a weight loss program. At 6.4 lbs, you’ll develop burly shoulders in no time if you lug this around a lot. Thankfully the AC Adapter is tiny. The dimension are 14.2″ (360.0mm) wide x 10.5″ (267.0mm) depth x 1.7” (43.0mm) thick.

You can tell where the weight went as you test the chassis for flex – this notebook feels sturdy. The boring gray plastic is thick and flex free for the most part. Chrome accents around the touch pad and above the keyboard help the 5220 to look a bit less cheap.

Expansion cards are supported. Both and Cardbus and Expresscard 54 slot grace the 5220. A flash card reader is included that supports SD, MMC, MemoryStick and xD.

VGA and S-Video output allows you to connect to an external screen or projector. Four USB 2.0 and one Firewire port round things out.

Fun and Games

Software out of the box is standard PC fare; Vista, NTI CD burning suite, anti virus trial and Acer ePowering utilities. Nothing exciting and it works reasonably well if that is what you like. My advice to you is back it all up and start having fun.

Ubuntu 8.0.4 did not support the 5220’s wireless card, but everything else worked out of the box. The Broadcom BCM4311 seems to give a lot of people problems. Fedora 9 LiveCD runs well too, but it requires a bit more tweaking after the first boot. Like Ubuntu, there is no support for the BCM4310 WiFi card. The fonts also looked a bit strange, slightly truncated. I tried a full install of Fedora 9 and the WiFi card was still not detected. With either of these two distributions you will have to connect by Ethernet and update before WiFi works.

A certain other highly desirable Unix based operating system works fairly well on the 5220 – I am referring to Apple OS X of course. It does take quite a bit of work to get everything working, but its a lot of fun. A quick trip to the OSX86 Project Wiki and forums allowed me to solve the most glaring incompatibility; WiFi. There are still a few kinks, but this is instantly more usable than either of the two highly touted Linux distros that I tried.

The 5220’s modest components run Leopard very well, with all of its advanced features. There is a huge difference between the 5220 running Vista and the same notebook running Leopard. As an owner of several Macs including an iMac that runs Leopard, the success of this community effort strikes me as nothing less than stunning. It runs circles around Vista and Linux. There is an irony that Linux, an OS trying so hard for mainstream adoption after all these years is no better than a hacked together OSX86 distribution – at least on this notebook.

In terms of entertainment, the 5220 delivered smooth playback of every type of content thrown at it up to a maximum of 720p HD content (H.264 tested). For a single core budget notebook this was to be expected – 1080p is too much to hope for.

Casual games, and retro titles that do not require the latest GPUs run fine on the 5220. This would be a great machine to relive or experience for the first time awesome games like Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment and Fallout. New hack for these titles allow them to run at full resolution – Planescape with 1280*800 pixels is breath taking.

Conclusion

With a poor battery life and hefty weight, at normal business value PC price of $600 I would advise most people to avoid the Acer Extensa 5220. But with a price of $399 (less with coupons) it is hard not to appreciate the value on offer here.

This is a solid workhorse notebook. It is built on a well-support platform that is compatible with lots of operating systems. It has the ports a business user needs and technologies like DASP to keep data safe.

It handles Vista well-enough (you really need 2 GB or more to enjoy Vista), and Linux could be quite livable with a bit of work (WiFi). But Leopard works really well with the stock hardware and hints at just how much bloat is in Microsoft’s latest OS. Apple’s OS X 10.5 is the best $130 a PC user can spend right now (assuming you have the right hardware) and is worth the effort of getting working on a non-Apple PC.

For shoppers seeking a basic computer or hacking/tweaking platform this Acer will be a good choice. The Extensa 5220 is priced similar to a Pentium-M based used/refurbished business class notebooks you can find on eBay (IBM T4x, Latitudes, Tecras), but it is new and comes with a lot of extra features (newer processor technology, better optical, warranty).

Verdict: Buy