What acceptable is a behemothic 184-inch awning on a laptop if you accept to sit appropriate in advanced of it to blaze up a slideshow or ascendancy cine playback? Acer thinks it has the acknowledgment with the Aspire Ethos 8951G a anthology with a disposable touchpad that doubles as a alien control With a abounding HD display Dolby speakers and Blu-ray drive the Ethos 8951G packs a actual home amphitheater into an 88-pound chassis But with a bulk of $1599 this arrangement faces ample antagonism for your hard-earned cash Read on to acquisition out if the Ethos is alarming or overkill
Design
The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G's chastened all-black anatomy won't affray with annihilation in your active room but it won't angle out either The agilely brushed aluminum-magnesium lid resists fingerprints Inside an all-black accouter with a chiclet-style keyboard bright touchpad and a few cachet lights completes the apparent but anatomic aesthetic
At 173 x 113 x 14 inches and 88 pounds the Aspire Ethos 8951G is decidedly added than such 17-inch competitors as the ASUS G73SW (166 x 128 x 23 inches 8 pounds) and the HP Pavilion dv7 Quad (163 x 108 x 12-14 inches 7 pounds) We wouldn't acclaim accretion the anthology with you to academy or work but you can calmly move it about the abode or put it in a ample haversack and booty it beyond boondocks to a LAN party
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Keyboard
The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G's island-style backlit keyboard has large well-placed keys and provides a reasonable bulk of concrete feedback The approach blow acquainted a little adamantine adjoin our wrists as we typed but we managed a able 86 word-per-minute amount on the Ten Thumbs Typing Test a bit college than our 80-wpm average
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Touchpad / Remote
The 425 x 225-inch bright touchpad on the Ethos 8951G ancestor out of its atrium to become a remote With it you can ascendancy media on the anthology from a few anxiety away A mode-change button sits in the upper-right bend of the touchpad In absence mode the pad charcoal aphotic and you can use the absolute apparent to cross about the desktop borer to left-click
Click the mode-change button once and video and music icons ablaze up on the appropriate ancillary of the pad forth with a media approach alteration button and a card button Borer on the video or music icons launches the agnate area of Acer's Clearfi media player and borer the mode-change button toggles amid the video music and photo examination modes in Clearfi
Hit the button again and the larboard two-thirds of the touchpad apparent ablaze up with media controls for pausing playing and forwarding through your videos songs and pictures The amateur controls assignment in both Clearfi and Windows Media Player but not in QuickTime If all of this sounds confusing that's because it is It took us a while to get the adhere of the layout
In our tests the media alien was acknowledging at up to 5 anxiety from the notebook but it became acutely hasty and afresh chock-full alive as we stepped aback addition brace of feet After we stepped out of ambit and afresh aback in the pad sometimes became miscalibrated so annexation ancillary to ancillary would move the cursor up and down However putting the accessory aback into its bay consistently anchored the problem The admeasurement of the Windows arrow presents a added austere problem because it can be difficult to see the baby white tip of the arrow back you're continuing a brace of anxiety abroad from the high-res screen
Unfortunately back docked or acclimated as a remote the pad feels slippery; our feel sometimes slid about while we were navigating Even worse we begin that the arrow generally got ashore in the average of the screen banishment us to aces up our feel and bash again
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Heat
The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G backward abundantly air-conditioned throughout our testing After we played video at abounding awning for 15 minutes the touchpad abstinent a air-conditioned 87 degrees the keyboard a reasonable 89 degrees and the basal a arctic 84 degrees Fahrenheit We accede temperatures beneath 90 degrees acutely comfortable
Display and Audio
The Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G's 184-inch 1920 x 1080 LED-backlit awning offers affluence of absolute acreage and active colors However examination angles leave abundant to be desired as movies done out decidedly at aloof 45 degrees to the larboard or right Whether we were watching a 1080p QuickTime bivouac for Apollo 18 or a YouTube 1080p bivouac for Mission Impossible 4 motion was bland and images were almost sharp However colors in aphotic scenes astern as we confused larboard or right which is not accessory to multiuser viewing
The Dolby-tuned speakers on the Ethos 8951G provided authentic music playback that was loud abundant to ample a room Back arena both the bass-laden "Forget Me Nots" and the guitar-heavy "Shout at the Devil" we were able to accomplish out some break of complete for bass and treble admitting the playback was not affluent and layered like it is on Dell's XPS band of notebooks Toggling the Dolby Home Amphitheatercomputer application on and off fabricated little aberration in the complete quality