The Acer Aspire 5920's biggest selling point is its looks -- or so Acer would have you believe. It was crafted with the assistance of over 100 designers and engineers from BMW Designworks -- the folks behind the gorgeous BMW Z07 concept car. We thought it looked pretty sexy in pictures, but is it as impressive in the flesh?
Design
We're not afraid to say Acer (or BMW Designworks) got it wrong with the Aspire 5920 -- it's hideous. We couldn't find a soul in our office who thought it was attractive. The glossy, slightly curved screen lid is trendy enough, but glossy screen lids are the laptop equivalent of jeans and a t-shirt -- nothing special. Having said that, the car door handle-style screen opening mechanism, which doubles as a webcam, looks the business.
If you thought the outside was bad, just wait until you see the inside. Don't let the white-looking pictures fool you -- it's beiger than John Major. Sure, beige is inoffensive, but it makes this laptop look like it was crafted from leftover Amiga bits.
BMW Designworks has attempted to make it resemble a centre console from one of their cars by incorporating shortcut keys on either side of the main keyboard. The left-most ones are for launching, activating and deactivating Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and launching a browser and email client. These sit next to a blank button at the bottom left -- which is reminiscent of those dummy 'buttons' you'd find on a car that doesn't have all the optional extras. It looks silly.
What's more infuriating is that the shortcut buttons on the left are mechanical, while those on the right (for controlling media playback) are touch-sensitive. We'd have preferred an all-mechanical design as it's incredibly easy to touch the buttons by accident. Doing so causes the laptop to emit an incredibly obnoxious beeping noise like a supermarket checkout. The hugely unresponsive mouse trackpad is almost as annoying.
The evidence suggests the designers know much more about designing cars than they do about designing laptops. Why else would the lone USB port on the right side sit about 1mm away from the DVD-ROM drive? Once you connect a standard-sized USB device, it physically blocks the drive bay, preventing it from opening. What's more, the logo showing the location of the USB port sits above the optical drive, and not the USB port. The word 'wrong' doesn't do it justice.
Our final design gripe is with the mouse trackpad -- it's too wide. Perhaps it's our bucket-like hands that cause the problem, but the ball of our right hand would often stray on to the mouse trackpad, causing the cursor to move around the screen just when you least want it to. This wouldn't be so much of a problem were there a button to temporarily disable the mouse -- but there isn't.
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pcnaburri 15 November 2011
Good: Performance, keyboard, screen.
Bad: DVD Recorder, speakers, Wi-fi and specially HEAT!!
Comment: I'm a graphic designer and this was my first laptop. It was so fast and that's useful because i can show and change in real time my works in front of the customer. The screen is also a good point, it's easy to show what's in the computer to a bunch of people.
In the other hand the first thing that pissed me was his wi-fi that stoped working once in a while (I'm not sure is it was just me though...). Also, the DVD-Recorder is so bad, it has trouble reading a lot of DVD's and CD's and i had some problems writting too. That's why i purchased an external DVD Recorder and it was so much better.
The worst thing of all was the heat, i purchased this laptop 4 years ago i even installed extra fans under the laptop and even with this the laptop destroyed himself with his heat. Time to buy another one...
Magne Leon Høyvik 10 February 2011
Good: It is actually quite good when it comes to all the new games, it runs them fast, and without any big issues that you will find with other computers.
Bad: It is very hot where you usually have your left hand, when you play games like "WoW" then you need the "W,A;S;D" to move, and if you try to have your hand on to the computer, then you will burn yourself.
Comment: This Laptop, is good overall, but... The heat is something every First-Person-Shooter gamer will hate!
It runs fast though, when you think about what grapichs it can handle before it going to slow down drastically. If you even try to have games like "Starcraft 2" on the highest then this computer laggs BAD! Even in offline mode when playing.
But the Laptop can have many games and other program softwares on it (including movies that has been downloaded and etc.) without any problems on the graphical settnings on games, and the speed it runs on.
And once again "but".... The gray color on the inside is EVIL! I hate it above anything else, but if you have a computer like this that runs smoothly, then the evil-paintjob-from-Lucifer wouldn't matter that much :)
ILoveComputers 26 August 2010
Comment: Also I find the phrase of the verdict on the review: The Aspire 5920 is a candidate for the ugliest laptop of the year. It's smeared in enough grey to put British skies to shame, and has has some absolutely awful design touches.
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