Acer Aspire ???

[HotDamn!]

Looking at a pretty good priced laptop but I have no experience with Acer.. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Open for suggestions around the $450-600 range.

p.s. this is for my girlfriend and she doesn't do a whole lot of video editing or anything so a well priced and reliable laptop is what we are after, thanks for any help.

Model: Aspire 7736z-4088


http://us.acer.com/acer/productv.do?LanguageISOCtxParam=en&kcond61e.c2att101=69961&sp=...rAjaxHistory=0

[redwudz]

From my experience with Acer, about the cheapest quality around. I'd probably look into Toshiba. They may be a bit better and about the same prices. JMO.

[HotDamn!]

From my experience with Acer, about the cheapest quality around. I'd probably look into Toshiba. They may be a bit better and about the same prices. JMO.

I appreciate the reply. I'll head over to Newegg.com now and look at the store some more tomorrow

[HotDamn!]

Just found this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114788

Looks pretty good and has some good reviews. I'm not worried about the noise nor the battery life and I have a Win7 disc so I can wipe it clean of the crap

Good call on the Toshiba redwudz, I'm gonna keep looking around and will gladly accept more suggestions and comments.

Thanks

[creamyhorror]

Here's a limited-time offer:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114875&Tpk=TOSHIBA%20Satellit...6&SID=FW8su5u8

$430 shipped for a 14" Toshiba with a T4400 processor, good deal. Main drawback is the 2-hr battery life. (Toshiba laptops are almost as reliable as Asus ones and more reliable than Sonys and Macs, according to Squaretrade's data.)

[budz]

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/835857/Toshiba-Satellite-L505D-LS5007-156-Widescreen/

upgradeable to 8gb ram, w7 home 64bit, 250gb hd but short battery life 2 hours....if i needed a laptop i'd buy it....just my 2 cents!

[EddyH]

Acer make some decent machines (got an old mid/late-90s soldier of theirs in the cupboard that still works fine), but I'd shy away from the Aspire laptops and desktops - they're distinctly low-budget items. OK if you haven't much cash, just want to do a bit of typing and web browsing and don't mind chucking it away in a few years time... but as you're on this forum I'd guess you want something a little more high performance and quality.

Without having canvassed the whole market I can at least recommend giving HP a try. My own lappy is one of their old tablet PCs (early 2006 vintage now) and it's still rocking along just fine, just about keeping up with the stuff I throw at it. Even makes a reasonable fist of outputting 720p MP4 material, not bad for something bought primarily as a semi-rugged ultralight. There's a couple of silly bugs and niggles (i suspect drivers that never got updated because it's a niche product) that have to be forgiven, but it's made up for in solidity and a surprising level of power (in benchmarks my current dual-core work desktop doesn't even score 2x as fast, and it *feels* slower). Would happily consider one of their newer models as a replacement. Not so Acer, having seen ones owned by my cousins literally die - as in just stop working completely - after a short lifetime of running hot, noisy and slow (and desktops of theirs in a previous job often left me screaming at them to GET ON WITH IT! Unbelievably anaemic for the supposed spec).

Others I know report good experiences with Dell laptops - including one soldiering on, albeit with only one remaining drive bay out of three, after a lightning strike on the house - but their customer service is atrocious (HPs is... OK). Toshibas have been a mixed bag - there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them, but they do tend to come supplied with bare-minimum amounts of RAM; dunno about their (or Acer's) CS.

If you want to be traitorous, the newer Macbooks look quite nice, but the previous generation were rotten so caveat emptor.

Everyone else - Sony, Asus, etc - ....erm


PS - don't underestimate the value of good battery life. Just don't. You may regret it when HAVING to use the machine off-grid.
Anything under 2 hours I'd consider more as a portable mini-desktop with a built in emergency UPS more than anything. Replaced my own laptop's battery when it faded enough to only offer 90 minutes; was a touch over 4 hours originally with normal settings, stretching out to 5+ with max power saving. And that's with the same power saving and a powerpack that isn't ludicrously huge; it's about the same size as the (2.5") hard disk compartment. Even the old Acer had about 2.5 ~ 3 hours of juice in its cells originally when I got it (having a NiMH pack and been run continually from the mains, so no fade).
---- because the important thing to bear in mind is that these are MAXIMUM figures, with little heavy processing or disk access... just writing blogs, reading emails and stuff. Start putting any kind of serious load on it - which even some complex webpages do these days - and that figure can drop like a stone, to 50% or less. You really want something with so little autonomy you can't even do an hour's serious work (or HDTV watching) on it?

[creamyhorror]

Here's the data I was going off:

SquareTrade Reports on Laptop Reliability: Asus and Toshiba come out on top

Today, SquareTrade released the results of a study compiled by its analytics team, with collected data on over 30,000 new laptops and netbooks.

• When excluding accidental damage and examining hardware malfunctions by manufacturer, Asus and Toshiba come out on top.
• Apple and Dell both fall in the middle with approximately an 18 percent failure rate; while industry leader HP has the highest failure rate.
• Over one in four HP laptops in the study experienced a hardware malfunction during the first three years of ownership.

Other highlights of the study include:

• Asus and Toshiba were the most reliable manufacturers, with fewer than 16 percent having a hardware malfunction over three years.
• Netbooks are projected to have a 20 percent higher failure rate from hardware malfunctions than more expensive laptop computers.
• Manufacturers proved to be a more reliable determinant of reliability than the type of laptop and should be a greater factor in making a purchase decision.

[HotDamn!]

Thanks for the charts and suggestions. So far I think we may go with the one budz suggested since my girlfriend and I both like it. I'll try to update if or when we get it.

thanks!

[HotDamn!]

We went to Office Depot and luckily they had a few still in stock. Only had it for 2 days now and it's great, especially for the price.

I would buy it again and suggest it to friends.

Any questions for a future buyer let me know and thanks for the suggestion budz saved us some money

[EddyH]

Bloody hell, don't let my laptop see this!
Mind you, *touches pine veneer* I'm hopefully in the 75% that DON'T see trouble.
I'd go for a Toshiba with a RAM upgrade based on that info then, unless Asus are as adept at high-performance, long-battery-life laptops as they are at dinky netbooks (with, unfortunately, weakling CPUs).

Here's the data I was going off:

SquareTrade Reports on Laptop Reliability: Asus and Toshiba come out on top

Today, SquareTrade released the results of a study compiled by its analytics team, with collected data on over 30,000 new laptops and netbooks.

[budz]

We went to Office Depot and luckily they had a few still in stock. Only had it for 2 days now and it's great, especially for the price.

I would buy it again and suggest it to friends.

Any questions for a future buyer let me know and thanks for the suggestion budz saved us some money

Your welx....good to hear you already enjoy the Toshiba laptop.