Acer eMachines E510
The beauty and the beast

Important: You can download the drivers by clicking here. I checked all the files and couldn’t find any threat in them, not even false positive.

In the past few days I was able to test an eMachines E510 notebook, fabricated by Acer.

The notebook’s design is quite nice, the case is black and the LCD is high quality, bright and my only issue with it was the reflections. It’s like a mirror, you can see yourself in it. Quite annoying.

The processor of the notebook is a an Intel Celeron with a FSB working at 533 MHz, the clock speed is 2.13 GHz and 1 Meg of cache. The notebook is shipped with 2 gigs of memory so in combination with the processor, this computer is an extremely good choice for, even advanced and graphics, animations heavy office work.

For the sake of why not, I decided to try to view a HD video (720p). For my shock, it was played smoothly. As the E510 has an additional VGA port to send the video output to an external device, for example a HD Ready TV-set with VGA input port, the eM-E510 is excellent for viewing high definition clips and movies directly on your television.

Usually notebooks are not recommended for playing games. This rule applies on the eMachines E510 too. Even though the processor speed and the amount of RAM is high enough for playing mid-range games like the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, when i tried playing it, the performance was poor. This is the result of the low-end video-card integrated in the system, an Intel GMA X3100 with shared memory (up to 358MB).

The notebook comes with preinstalled, bootable Linux. Changing the OS can give some headaches for the beginner user. By default, the SATA mode is set to AHCI, Advanced Host Controller Interface. If you let it as is, setting up *any* type of Windows will fail.

My first test was to install Windows XP Professional, but while setup, the installer couldn’t find the installed HDD, a Hitachi 160 Gig (5200 rpm). This could be solved only by setting the SATA mode to IDE, when the installer ran without any issue. The next issue appeared when, after the first boot Windows informed me about some missing drivers: for the Broadcom LAN card, the video card and the High Definition Audio sound card. I thought not a problem, since I got with the notebook a DVD containing additional software and drivers. I was wrong: the DVD contained drivers ONLY for Vista, so my only option was to download the drivers from the internet, but since the LAN card wasn’t working, the option wasn’t plausible.

To install Windows XP on an eMachines E510, you have to switch the SATA Mode from AHCI to IDE from within the BIOS, else the installation will fail. To use AHCI with Windows XP, first you have to install XP in IDE mode, install the AHCI drivers, THEN switch the AHCI on in the BIOS.

Update: there’s a workaround posted in the comments section of this page, please scroll down to see it.

The next test was installing Windows Vista Ultimate. As the installer is much more advanced than the XP’s, i thought there will be no issue. Again, I was wrong: the computer halted when Vista tried to configure its software. The solution was again to switch the AHCI off, then the installation didn’t fail. But just for the sake of the fun, if you switch later AHCI on, Vista will not boot. At all. The only fix was coming from Microsoft’s Knowledge Base. If you read it, the whole thing is very logical and dumb in the same time.

The Li Ion batteries resisted 1 hour and 57 minutes when the notebook was used for typing this article and 54 minutes when I was viewing a HD video. I’d rate this performance as excellent for its class.

The WLAN device was working properly in any condition. It was able to connect to a desktop computer from almost 100 meters, but at this distance the drop of the transfer was considerable.

The price of the Acer eMachines E510 is $500 + VAT where I live. Generally, the performance was very good for office work and even for HD media display. In comparison with its price, I would say that it’s an awesome choice for business-men or bloggers who travel a lot. I’d recommend it for almost anyone.

Important: You can download the drivers by clicking here. I checked all the files and couldn’t find any threat in them, not even false positive.