On Tuesday, 17th April 2007 I ordered a laptop from Harvey-Norman (purchasing a laptop from Harvey-Norman eh?). The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5613ZWLMi, powered with an Intel Pentium Dual Core, 1.6 GHz with total 1 MB L2 cache (512 KB L2 cache for each core). I’ve never heard of this processor before, but after googling from the internet, I found that Pentium Dual Core is an OEM processor, this processor family appears in some brands’ value line notebooks in early 2007. Technically speaking, this is a Core Duo processor with L2 cache reduced to total 1 MB, the model is T2060 (compare: T2050, a Core Duo with 2 MB L2 cache). The laptop itself is quite cheap, it costs SGD 1199 or around USD 800, but I also bought additional 4 years warranty (so total is 5 years warranty) which costs SGD 175. The warranty itself is quite nice, it covers hardware service and replacement after 1st year warranty from Acer, and if the hardware part cannot be serviced or no replacement available, they will replace the laptop with a new one.
The configuration for the laptop itself:
- Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T2080 (1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
- 1GB DDR II RAM
- 15.4″ WXGA TFT LCD, 1280 x 800, 16.7M colours
- Intel® 943GML integrated 3D graphics
- 80GB HDD
- DVD-Super Multi Double-Layer drive (DVD+/-RW)
This is the best price / performace laptop I’ve ever seen, I was considering Dell laptops since their cheapest one costs around SGD 1100. But after seeing this Acer model, I realized that the Dell is quite expensive, especially since the processor is only AMD Sempron 3500+ and only 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM. I also found some Celeron models from Lenovo at around SGD 900, but they can be considered expensive for Celerons.
This laptop comes with preinstsalled Windows Vista Home Premium. The Vista partition takes around 35 GB, left 36 GB for my Linux (Acer uses first 7 GB for the Windows recovery system). The Vista Aero is quite nice, I’m pretty like it. But unfortunately I won’t use Vista as main OS 
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