Acer Aspire AS5251 Laptop Review - A Sub $400 Laptop

Acer has recently skyrocketed in the list of the best selling laptops with their Acer Aspire AS5251. At under $400, the price cannot be beat. But does this inexpensive laptop pack enough punch to be considered among the best?

Of course, what first interests us about this AS5251 Acer laptop is the price. We are accustomed to seeing the top rated netbook come in at prices around $400, but not laptops. Laptops, typically, do not have the compromises and concessions that we find on netbooks. These compromises are found in the form of limited memory, smaller hard drives, less-powerful processors, and much smaller laptop screens.

So, let's look at what, if any, compromises that Acer had to make to deliver us this AS5251 laptop under $400 (the current asking price is $379 at many locations).

The first thing that I noticed when I received this laptop was the look and feel of the machine. It's quite similar to the ASUS UL80Vt-A1, which I currently rate as the best price/performance laptop on the market today. The machine is black and comes with a 15.6-inch widescreen laptop monitor that provides solid quality with a built web cam, easily enabling you to video-chat with all of your friends.

Intel's Main Advantage - Speed of Having New Products

Intel China Research Center is working on Model-based Computing to optimize the use of its multi core microprocessor technology. Hint, Microsoft is currently looking closer into virtualization software. It seems that virtualization it's more related to server technology. The virtualization strategy combined with utility computing that uses virtual machines, & the third most important factor; the multi core chip's scalability, performance & power efficiency to reach high levels of work load consolidation in data centers.

Tera-scale computers which are based on 10 to 100s of integrated processor cores perform 3 workloads in Model based computing: "Recognition object or pattern in a database, data mining (source the data base to find identical objects or related patterns that match the target object), & information synthesis (you mine out data, different patterns & objects, put together in a way that user can digest; user can derive useful solutions)" quoted from Vived De; fellow of Intel.

Let us briefly compare side by side, the main offerings from both Intel & AMD quad core microprocessors. You can see that AMD's strategy is taking the competitors weakness as its strength. AMD keeps mentioning about its superior 2mb L3 cache; touted as better than any of its competitors while Intel is in a competition with its own past achievements. Intel is staying away from a head to head "chicken play" with AMD by producing new products much faster than its nearest competitors even though it misses a few innovative hits like a new L3 cache.