Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2015
Edit: Down at the bottom I have the solution for the Linux issues I talk about in the second part of this review.
Introductory note: This ran a bit long. I have a tl;dr section way down below which lists pros, cons, and a general conclusion.
I've owned this laptop for a little over five months now. There are a lot of good things about this laptop. In its normal use case, Running Windows 8.1, this will be a great little device. It isn't anything to compare to a 1k laptop, but it does what it should do, and that is compute. Even more than that, I was shocked at just how many games I could run at reasonable graphics settings and play smoothly. This includes quite a lot of Valve games. I didn't expect it to handle that very well, but it not only handled gaming well, but at cool temperatures to boot. It also managed to handle Everquest II at balanced graphics, on a heavily populated server, during a raid. I am reasonably impressed by the power available on this little thing.
Additionally, It was capable of running Windows 10, Quite smoothly (Or as smoothly as a tech preview can be ran), and running 8.1 in a Hyper-V (Microsoft's Virtualization Offering) environment. This is likely due to the fact that it has Vanderpool technology, which rather shocked me. All in all, even for non standard use cases on windows, this is a great little machine.
In terms of physical feel? Buy a mouse. The Elan touch pad is very glitchy without the driver installed, and may not function at all. This can be changed by entering the UEFI/BIOS using F2 on bootup and changing the Touchpad setting from Advanced to Basic. At that point most generic drivers will do just fine, and the touchpad becomes reasonably useful again. Please note that for some reason, this UEFI/BIOS option is only available through a firmware upgrade that you can download from Acer's website. If you follow along with the directions, Updating the firmware is a very quick process, and I can't recommend it enough, as it turned this irritating touchpad into something I feel comfortable using on the go.
Do remember it is made of plastic, but even so, it has survived a dog induced tumble.
One last note on the hardware until a bit later on: The screen is brighter than the sun at maximum power. Really. I've had to crawl out of bed at 2AM to check something for work, and I assure you that I can get all the light therapy I will ever need from this laptop. This isn't a problem if you're a windows user, as the laptop comes with brightness controls. Additionally, there is a program called f.lux which monitors the sunset and sunrise at your exact latitude and longitude and adjusts the colour temperature of your screen accordingly.
If you're just planning on surfing the web, checking email, and even light gaming, this is a fantastic system for a VERY reasonable price.
Those are the comments for the normal use case, but from there this review tapers into some non-conventional use cases, and issues I have noticed that are not immediately available on this page for research that some users may like to know. If you're only intention is the use case above, feel free to stop reading, or jump to the tl;dr section below, and note that for those use cases I can offer a solid recommendation for this machine.
Now for the not so conventional use cases, and my observations. My primary job and hobby consists of Low Level Programming work on different operating systems (Linux, Windows, BSD, Solaris). Because of this, this hard drive has been host to a number of them, and here's what I've noted about various components. Note that the system seems fussy. So you may have better or worse luck. (For my opinion on the origins of this fussyness, check out the ACPI section below.)
Wireless: Your wireless card is an AR9565, which theoretically has universal support, albeit at different levels. This card works 99.999% of the time with zero issues. The reason it even made it on here is that on FreeBSD, the card is detected and the driver loaded, but it doesn't actually connect. The issue comes in at the WPA Handshake. I didn't investigate this as in depth as the other issues below, which is why I wanted to get it out of the way quickly. One last note, 5GHz is not supported.
Video: Oh boy. Currently the xf86-video-intel driver is broken for this device, which identifies itself as a GEM, but in windows uses an HD4500(I believe. It does use an HD####, I just can't exactly remember which one.) Here is the lspci output:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series Graphics & Display (rev 0e)
I'll get to the issue with it saying Atom in just a bit. Basically, it is based on Atom architecture, but it is definitely not an atom. While intel is normally supported quite well, this graphics card, which uses the i915 driver, is broken. You can work around this by entering "nomodeset" at your kernel boot line. This is a noted issue if you google for the Z36xxx device.
This issue is so prevalent and so painful that it actually has restricted my distribution choices down to openSUSE only. I have, to date, tried: Fedora, Elementary, Debian, Arch, Sabayon, Kali, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Crunchbang, Archbang, and finally openSUSE. Again, only the last one got me anywhere at all, and even then the touchpad had to be set to Basic in the bios, otherwise it would require an I2C driver.
Furthermore, the OpenGL interface is broken. If you buy this device, be prepared to use XRender across KDE4, Plasma5, Gnome3, and any other DE that utilizes Direct Rendering. I have been tinkering around with this device (which lead me to discovering the next section), and I have not yet made any significant progress. However, there is some good news in that this is a known bug, and it is being worked on, but as of yet remains unsolved even on OpenSUSE's rolling release. I believe this goes without saying, but gaming is completely out the window. In fact, some valve games won't even run, as they do not recognize the graphics card. Once the underlying issue in i915 is fixed, however, I expect gaming to be respectable, albeit at minimum graphics settings.
ACPI: This is a whole bag of worms as it always is on Linux systems. Essentially, you have a 50/50 shot of losing your backlight controls, and having the machine somehow eat itself in the middle of the night if you put it to sleep. I now make sure to shut down each night.
I have spent some time probing into why this is an issue (If you try searching this model number on google, in terms of linux information the results are pathetic at best), and have uncovered the following, along with relevant lines and commentary:
The first issue is that the acer_wmi kernel driver will halt the ACPI video driver from being loaded. If you aren't quite sure what that means, it means that your backlight controls will not be exposed through the /sys interface, nor the depreciated proc interface:
zyradyl@captor:~> dmesg | grep 'ACPI video'
[ 12.520647] acer_wmi: Disabling ACPI video driver
zyradyl@captor:~> ls /sys/class/backlight/
zyradyl@captor:~>
I went through the source file on the github page for acer_wmi and couldn't quite figure out what was causing the system to disable itself. There are a few lines in the dmesg that may be relevant, the most suspicious one follows:
zyradyl@captor:~> dmesg | grep 'conflicts'
[ 12.434814] ACPI Warning: SystemIO range 0x0000000000002000-0x000000000000201f conflicts with OpRegion 0x0000000000002000-0x000000000000200f (\_SB_.PCI0.SBUS.SMBI) (20150204/utaddress-258)
There are some potential workarounds. The most common one is to add 'acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=linux' to your kernel boot options. I currently have this enabled, and I still do not have brightness controls, nor is the interface exposed. I disassembled the DSDT, and the backlight system is in there. It works in windows, and again, half the time (On reinstalls. If you get an install where it isn't recognized, you need to go again. Clearly there is something that gets a wrong detection, or maybe some subtle difference in the order that some modules make it in. I'm not really sure and I have enough backups that reinstalling is just quicker.) it works even on linux.
Note that when it DOES work, the brightness controls are inverted, at least to me. Left turns it up, bright turns it down. This is an easy fix, just look up i915 invert backlight.
These DSDT and ACPI errors also make it to the disk, changing the ways it can be identified, which confuses the system:
zyradyl@captor:~> dmesg | grep dev-disk-by
[ 15.992252] systemd[1]: Device dev-disk-by\x2dpartlabel-primary.device appeared twice with different sysfs paths /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/ata1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda/sda1 and /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/ata1/host0/target0:0:0/0:0:0:0/block/sda/sda4
I have audited the startup, and have yet to find an indicated reason for this behaviour in dmesg, therefore I am assuming it to be UEFI/BIOS based.
As to the commentary about the system eating itself: IMHO, do *NOT* allow this system to hibernate. For whatever reason, going from sleep to Hibernate destroyed the BTRFS. I don't know if it would have gone better on Ext4, and I really didn't care to try, but it managed to eat the EFI partition too. Maybe this is a one off, maybe something was running like a defrag on the BTRFS and it was killed mid file? I can't honestly say.
Processor: This is more of an issue in terms of grepping about for system information, but everything on the board identifies itself as an Atom subsystem. The architecture is based off of atom--clearly the reason linux is picking up on this--but does not identify itself any differently from the standard atom stamped processors. Speed wise, it is what I would expect from a System on a Chip.
Webcam: This isn't a negative point at all, the webcam works quite nicely, and OOB, on every single install and every single live CD I've used. I'm more accustomed to having to work for my selfies. I wanted to make a note of this because on some of the cheaper systems you can end up with a webcam that just becomes a screen ornament if you switch off windows.
Note about TPM and TXE Subsystem:
Despite the fact that it has a Trusted Execution Engine, it is actually impossible to create a chain of trust, as there is no identifiable TPM, not even in windows. This makes the TXE, and the ability to set a custom Secure Boot verified EFI File, basically worthless. It is easy to assume there is a TPM hiding inside the TXE subsystem, but there is no way to expose it, not even with the drivers Acer makes available through its website.
tl;dr -
Pros:
+Great little system for the price
+Remains cool to touch and virtually silent outside of long compilation jobs.
+Will do anything and everything you ask it to in windows, and do it happily
+Runs games at reasonable settings
+Sturdier than you would expect
+Radical battery life
+Vanderpool tech
+Decently customizable UEFI/BIOS
+Screen as bright as a star going supernova
Cons:
-Screen as bright as a star going supernova
-Weird ACPI causes errors in linux and potentially BSD
-Even Worse, the errors are just as hard to predict as the successes
-Video card is esoteric. Hard to get specific support, even Intel seems fine with just handing off a similar driver for a different card as official support for this integrated graphics device.
-The BIOS/UEFI is frankly rather weird. There are far more interfaces in it than are exposed by the setup utility or the ACPI. Once I get brightness controls working again I plan to dive into the abyss and see what, if anything, I can find and potentially hook into. If I find anything handy I will update this review.
-Wireless card doesn't support 5GHz.
-Really odd touchpad that requires a proprietary I2C for "Best" performance.
-Best performance of touchpad doesn't seem to account for palm detection, kind of lame.
-Generally made from such obtuse hardware that it is hard to support. Disappointing from a company becoming known for its chromebooks.
Conclusion:
I would recommend this for 90% of users. It goes above and beyond what I expected when I purchased it (considering I had switched of a Samsung Chromebook in use since my previous laptop bit the dust, it might as well have been delivered by God himself). The build quality isn't anything to write home about, but it does what it should for a laptop: Stays on without a cord for quite a while, has wifi, browses the net, and handles light gaming loads. However, if you are a *nix power user that is looking for something rather cheap but still useful, you might actually do better in investing in Acer's Intel based chromebooks, as they utilize Coreboot for the BIOS and linux for chrome. (Pop device into Dev mode and load your distro of choice).
Update:
If you are on linux, and your ACPI video subsystem works giving you a populated /sys/class/backlight, append "i915.backlight_invert=1" to your kernel boot line, and bam. OpenGL is even working. Backlight works, power management works, sleep works again. Love this thing now.
