Acer Aspire AS6930-6073 16-inch Thin and Light Laptop PC

May 11 2009 - Acer's Aspire AS6930-6073 may be a bit heavy and larger than many competing 16-inch laptops, but the $900 price tag and excellent feature list make this a very attractive laptop for those wanting a laptop with good performance, dedicated graphics at a very reasonable price. The biggest complaint has to be the software setup with its fair amount of trailware and odd partitioning that can fixed with some effort after purchase.

May 11 2009 - For $900, the Acer Aspire AS6930-6073 offers a good level of performance. The Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 dual core processor is typical of systems costing several hundred dollars more. The 4GB of DDR2 memory allow it to run Vista applications without any issues. It is held back a bit by slower PC2-5300 DDR2 memory compared to the more common PC2-6400. Most people won't notice the difference unless they are using memory intensive applications though.

The Aspire AS6930-6073 has a fairly average sized hard drive with 320GB of space but spinning at the slower 5400rpm rate for slightly less performance but improved battery life. The bad part about this isn't the space but Acer splitting the drive into two roughly 140GB partitions. This is somewhat annoying and can be corrected by making restore discs, reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS. It takes time but can make using the system easier by not having to deal with the multiple partitions.

Multimedia on the Aspire AS6930-6073 is one of the best aspects of the laptop. With the NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GS graphics processor, the system is able to handle high definition video streams without any issues and even play most of today's games without issue up to the displays 1366x768 resolution. The audio is probably one of the better features thanks to the built-in subwoofer that gives it much better than average performance.

The biggest drawback to the Aspire As6930-6073 is its size and weight. The 16-inch display screen plus the built-in subwoofer give this system some of the larger dimensions found in this size range. The seven and a half pound weight also makes it a bit more difficult to carry around frequently. The additional bulk does give it the advantage of having space to fit a full keyboard including numeric keypad.