List Price: $729.99
Sale Price: $719.99
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We live out in the sticks, and when we finally got reliable 3G broadband and a wireless network set up, I was ready to no longer share the 2 year old computer with the rest of the family and get a laptop of my own. I use this laptop mainly for my home office: word processing, spreadsheets, internet, photo editing, and a few specific programs. I've found this unit to be a very reasonable tool for these functions.
This laptop is lightning fast, has plenty of memory, decent graphics/sound, and seems well constructed. I've read a couple of reviews that mention slow start ups, but I have not found this to be the case. I agree that Windows 8 has a pretty big learning curve for the first few days ("intuitive", my left foot!), but after some initial frustration I was able to navigate through the program screens rather easily. I find I still favor the "classic" laptop homescreen, but since Win 8 is app driven, that may be part of why you can have so many screens/tiles open and working with no speed lag. I also really like that the function shortcuts are printed on the keys in blue so I'm not constantly looking them up until I memorize them. I am not a fan of touchpads, so I like being able to quickly disable it with just a keystroke and turn on my wireless mouse instead. Bluetooth connected to all my other devices (wireless speaker, wireless headphones, my Droid X) without missing a beat. Again, noticed no loss of speed or data with multiple connections active.
Just a couple of things that bug me:
1. The CD drive is pretty flimsy. The first time I inserted a DVD to try out the graphics, the DVD did not stay in the tray.
When I pushed the tray into the laptop, the DVD floated up and lodged in the housing above the drive. Fortunately, I was
able to fish the DVD out using a piece of padding and some tweezers without damaging the laptop or the disk.
2. There is no caps lock/number lock indicator light. Sounds like a small thing...until you want to do a lot of word processing.
This kind of drives me crazy.
3. Not a big fan of the shiny piano case finish on the exterior and around the screen. Fingerprint city! I am always wiping
the thing off so I don't look like a slob.
4. There are no programs loaded onto the laptop "as is" that are not internet driven. I kind of enjoyed having a few games and
goodies on the old Windows formats that were available to play offline. Bye, bye solitaire.
Admittedly, the above list are small things that I like to grouse about, but they would not be enough alone to keep me from making this purchase again. I still think this is a good machine for the money.
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Good for the price (680$ ish) although there are minor flaws with this design.Quick note: I've maxed out the ram, installed an ssd and installed windows 7.
Even without the ram/ssd upgrade this computer is still quite fast.
Good stuff
+ Construction is fine, nothing's loose (flex below the keyboard though)
+ Screen is quite bright, should be view-able outdoors if sun isn't to bright
+ Optical drive (not flimsy at all)
+ Not too bulky
+ 3rd gen i7
+ Keyboard is comfortable and responsive
+ Exterior design is very sensible
+ Internal fan is usually very quiet
+ Good packaging, arrives in one piece.
Not so good stuff
Acer doesn't sell higher capacity batteries so you will have to order from some shady foreign retailer if you need one.
Bad speakers, you can compensate somewhat with third party software. I personally recommend breakaway audio enhancer instead of the dolby home theater.
Both the lid and plastic surrounding the touchpad are fingerprint magnets.
Keyboard and the edge below it will leave marks on the screen (happens on all laptops).
Touchpad placement could be better. It will impede left-handed typing unless temporarily disabled, or until you adjust.
Touchpad gestures are clumsy, 'unlocked' versions of the elantech touchpad driver don't actually exist. (More on this below)
No caps lock, scroll lock, or num lock indicator lights. (Arguably not a bad thing)
Keyboard has minor ghosting issues.
Other thoughts:
If you're going to install a fresh OS as I did, finding suitable touchpad drivers is next to impossible. Each driver version that you can hunt down on the internet removes some features and activates others for no obvious reason. Basically, no publicly available drivers enable all the hardware supported features at the same time. The only way to permanently activate all of the touchpad's features (2/3/4 finger gestures, regions, scroll settings, etc..) is to edit the driver's installation config file. Shame on elantech and acer for not having any sort of documentation or support for this. If the stock setup is fine or if the touchpad gestures are irrelevant then ignore this.
Also, the hm77 chipset supports up to 16gb of ram @ up to 1866mhz (or even higher, though not officially). You are *not* limited to 8gb as stated in the specifications.
Average cpu temp is 47-55c on a light workload, around 85c under stress.
Screen is glossy, not matte.
No technical manual included, but you can find one online if you search around.
Note that you have to hold f2 at boot to access the bios. If you have an SSD you may have to go in there and enable 'legacy bios' to get it to boot.
Also note that bios options are severely limited, the only thing you can adjust is boot order and system time. That is all.
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