Acer Aspire M5 review: A big display, terrific battery life, and a moderate price tag

Acer Aspire M (model M5-583P-6428) $700.00 Fans of large laptop touchscreens will appreciate the Aspire M’s roomy display, slim profile, and excellent battery life. The price-to-performance isn't bad either.

Despite being just 0.7 inch thick, Acer’s Aspire M5 (model M5-583P-6428) weighs a hefty 4.9 pounds. So it’s fortunate for Acer that Intel’s Ultrabook definition includes only a height limit: 0.9 inch. More important, the Aspire M delivers a big display, great battery life, and good performance for a moderate $700.

Outfitted with an Intel Core i5-4200U (one of the lower-end entries in Intel’s current Haswell lineup of mobile CPUs), a generous 8GB of DDR3/1600 RAM, Intel’s integrated HD4400 graphics, and a 500GB hard disk that spins its platters at 5400 rpm, the Aspire M scored a respectable Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 143. That’s almost 50 percent better than our reference unit, the Asus VivoBook S550CA, but we’ve seen a few laptops in this price range perform even higher.

Acer's Aspire M performed well on our benchmarks, but it's not a barn-burner.

It’s easy to see where the Aspire M falls behind in performance: With any tasks involving storage retrieval, its slow hard drive can’t compete against solid-state drives (or SSD caches), which are becoming increasingly common. But its Haswell architecture clearly helped Acer's machine hold its own in tasks involving number crunching (image editing, for example), and contributed to its impressive battery life of more than 7 hours. That’s one of the best running times we’ve seen from any laptop this year.

ROBERT CARDINThe 15.6-inch display allowed Acer to fit a full-size keyboard, including a numeric keypad, into the Aspire M's chassis.

The Aspire M's design makes a good first impression, with its pewter-colored brushed metal lid and black soft-touch underbelly. The plastic interior matches the color of the lid, contrasting nicely with the black island-style keyboard—a standard-size backlit model that includes a numeric keypad. But good luck landing on the correct key if you’re a touch typist: They’re flat and slippery, and it can be difficult to find keys that are normally on or near the right edge (backspace and delete, for example). A little sculpting on the keys and perhaps some extra spacing between the standard keyboard and the keypad would have helped.

The touch controls—a multitouch touchpad (with mechanical corners for right and left mouse clicks) and the Aspire M's 10-point touchscreen display are responsive and fun to use. The display itself is bright and pleasing; still, I was a bit surprised by Acer’s decision to go with a resolution of only 1366 by 768 pixels on its 15.6-inch screen. Acer didn’t include an optical drive, but when you’re streaming video, 1080p resolution looks so much better—especially when you’re up close to the screen. The Aspire M’s audio subsystem, on the other hand, is very good, thanks to a strong amplifier, four bottom-mounted speakers, and Dolby Home Theater.

ROBERT CARDINAlthough the Acer Aspire M is ultraslim, measuring just 0.7 inch thick, it weighs almost 5 pounds.

Connectivity and port options are basic: Two USB 2.0 ports (but just one USB 3.0 port), an SD card slot, headset jack, gigabit ethernet, HDMI, and an Acer Converter Port (for dongles, such as VGA). The Aspire M also supports dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi. The built-in high-def webcam was fairly typical, producing decent if not great video in Skype calls.

If you’re looking for a notebook with a large touchscreen and respectable performance, Acer’s Aspire M is a good choice at a price that won’t instill sticker shock. It’s not that easy to find all these attributes in a single product. And Acer has done a good job of balancing price and performance.

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Logitech Alert 750e Outdoor Master System Review: Terrific Resolution, but Supports Only Six Cameras

Both Logitech's outdoor (shown here) and indoor cameras deliver exceptional video quality.The most impressive feature of the Logitech Alert video surveillance system is the quality of its cameras, both in terms of the resolution of their video (960 by 720 at 15 frames per second) and their physical construction (the cases are fabricated from zinc, not plastic). The downside is their cost--and the fact that you can’t deploy more than six cameras.

You’ll need to buy a master system that includes either one indoor or one outdoor camera (priced at $300 or $350, respectively), and then purchase additional cameras for $200 (indoor), $230 (indoor with night vision), or $280 (outdoor with night vision) each. For our evaluation, we set up a four-camera system consisting of two outdoor cameras, one indoor camera, and one indoor night-vision camera. Assuming that you start with a master system that includes an outdoor camera, this package would cost $1060. (All prices are as of June 13, 2012.)

Networking

The setup we evaluated utilizes HomePlug AV powerline networking. In this kind of networking, electricity and ethernet data packets (including audio and video) travel over the same cable. This arrangement means you must have an AC receptacle within the vicinity of each camera you deploy, but you don’t need to string cable from your router or your computer to make any connections; you just plug Logitech’s HomePlug AV adapter (included with each master system) into an outlet near your router. Logitech provides a 10-foot ethernet ribbon cable with each camera, but you can purchase longer cables if you need them (a 50-foot cable is priced at $20, and a 100-foot cable costs $40). Each camera must be connected to a somewhat large HomePlug AV adapter (the indoor model plugs directly into a receptacle; the weatherized outdoor models, which have short pigtail plugs, should be secured to a wall).

Since Logitech routes the cameras' video through its own servers, you don’t need to futz with port forwarding or other complex router settings to enable remote viewing of your cameras. You can view live video from any PC, smartphone, or tablet with Internet access. To view recorded video or to control the system remotely, however, you’ll need to sign up for Logitech’s Web & Mobile Commander service (first year included, $80 per year after that).

The software can show all six cameras, but five are limited to very small windows. Fortunately, you can switch the order.We encountered no problems in our evaluation, but you should note that powerline networking can be problematic in some environments: If your home or facility has poor-quality electrical wiring, or if your circuits must also support machines that draw high amounts of electrical current, for example, powerline networking might deliver poor performance or fail altogether. If that describes your situation, or if you just don’t like powerline networking, Logitech also offers the same outdoor and indoor cameras set up to run on Power over Ethernet. The outdoor PoE model costs $240, and the indoor model is priced at $190 (currently Logitech does not sell the indoor night-vision camera configured for PoE). In addition to buying the cameras themselves, you’ll need to deploy a PoE ethernet switch to support these models (such devices start at about $80 for a four-port Fast Ethernet switch).

The Cameras

All cameras are equipped with microphones and motion detectors. You can fine-tune the latter using Logitech’s software, drawing independent zones within each camera’s field of view, and adjusting the camera’s sensitivity so that only large objects or significant motion will trigger the camera to record. You can also set up the software so that when the camera detects motion, it can send you an email or dispatch an instant message to your phone with a clip from the video. In our experience, however, this setting generated so many messages that we soon turned the messaging feature off.

Logitech’s cameras save motion-triggered video recordings to an on-board MicroSD card (a 2GB card is provided, but the cameras can support cards with up to 32GB of storage space). If you have a Dropbox account, you can set up the cameras to transfer recordings to the cloud automatically. Even without Dropbox, however, you can put the host PC to sleep when you’re not using it for other tasks, and save energy. When the PC is awake and Logitech’s software is running, the program will automatically prompt the cameras to archive their recordings to the host PC’s hard drive.

The cameras have excellent night vision up to 65 feet. Don't try to save money by putting an indoor camera in a window pointed outside, however, because the LEDs will reflect off the glass.Although Logitech’s cameras each carry a very good wide-angle lens, we wish that the company also offered a pan/tilt model. And if the cameras were outfitted with a speaker output, you could build a two-way video intercom system around them.

Bottom Line

The Logitech Alert system is top-shelf in nearly every respect: The cameras are rugged, they produce exceptional resolution, they record audio, they don’t rely on a host PC, and they’re easy to install and configure--even for remote viewing. We also appreciate the fact that they’re available in both powerline and PoE configurations, just like the Trendnet TV-IP322P. The one drawback is that the system is limited to a maximum of six cameras; although that isn't a problem for most homes, it might be inadequate for some businesses. If you’re looking for a video surveillance system you can deploy quickly, and if the six-camera limit isn’t a deal-breaker for you, we can’t recommend a better choice. The Swann DVR-4 2600 is almost as easy to deploy, but it's limited to four cameras and has a more restricted range.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of video surveillance systems. For more, read our introduction to the roundup.

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QNAP TS-879 Pro Review: Massive NAS Box Offers Terrific Capacity and Performance, for a Price

If your shared data or storage needs are greater than a four-bay box will handle, the eight-bay QNAP TS-879 Pro is just what the doctor ordered. With 2GB of memory and an Intel Core i3-2120 CPU, it's fast and then some. It also sports dual gigabit ethernet ports for failover protection and aggregation, plus QNAP's feature-rich operating system. But it's expensive: $2199 (as of March 23, 2012) without drives, and $2920 with 6TB of hard drives.

The TS-879 Pro is built like a tank, with eight front-mounted bays. In our roundup of 11 NAS boxes, only it and its cousin, the QNAP TS-459 Pro II, support 6GB/s SATA as well as drives with capacities greater than 2.2TB. The front of the unit contains a status display and a rocker selection/enter button for configuring the RAID array on the first run. Also on the front are a USB 3.0 port and a quick-copy button for transferring data onto the box from attached drives.

The back of the TS-879 Pro houses the ethernet ports, four USB 2.0 ports, a second USB 3.0 port, two eSATA ports, and three relatively unusual port types: a VGA connector for proprietary diagnostics, an HDMI port that lets you attach a monitor to display the output from video surveillance cameras, and an opening for the box's expansion slot that supports gigabit and 10 gigabit ethernet cards.

Though it finished third out of 11 NAS boxes on the task of writing a 10GB mix of files and folders (its speed was 54.2 megabytes per second), the TS-879 Pro was in other respects the fastest box we tested. It read the same mixed group of files and folders at a whopping 71.3 MBps, and it read our single large 10GB file at 111.6 MBps. Most impressively of all, it wrote that large file at 111.3 MBps. If you need to back up a lot of PCs in a hurry, this box can do it.

QNAP packs a lot of features into its very usable operating system--far too many to list here (QNAP has posted an online demo of the options)--but a short list includes DLNA-certified and iTunes media serving, Web serving, a wide array of remote-access protocols, and the ability to function as an LDAP or VPN server. QNAP already supported populating its user lists with LDAP. As on all QNAP boxes, the video surveillance access is strictly browser-based without the HDMI port provided by the TS-879 Pro for direct viewing.

At $2920 with its full complement of drives in place, the TS-879 Pro is clearly not intended for the average small-office or home-office user; small- and medium-size businesses, however, should take note. If you need the amount of storage that eight bays provide, along with top performance and advanced features, there's no better multibay NAS box to be had.

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