Joined on 12/13/08
Fast, cheap and durable
Pros: Fast, really quiet, nice finish, good enough graphics to play 1080p movies and decent games, battery life is decent, and a very good value for the price.
Cons: Bad mono speaker... but not that big of a deal for its use.
Overall Review: Bought this to replace a Toshiba laptop from 2004 with a Pentium 4. That old thing would get burning hot and make a ton of noise whenever you tried to do anything on it. This one... well I can't even hear it when its on lol. This is used as a primary computer for business use, and is on pretty much all the time. So far 8 months in and no problems to speak off, and its used pretty hard. Great laptop!
1 out of 3 failed
Pros: They are great at moving air, there cheap, they have cool LED's. Some might find them a bit bright though, just a fair warning. I didn't buy them for LED's, just the non LED version got worse reviews so oh well. I am happy with the ones that worked.
Cons: My biggest con is that one of them failed shortly after I installed it into the case. No idea why, either, just randomly decided it didn't want to spin. Also the connectors are not that great, thought I had a second broken fan, but I just had to wiggle the connecters a lot. The screws also strip REALLY easily, so just be aware of that. Thankfully there plenty of them included.
Overall Review: My first time getting a bad anything from Newegg, I suppose thats what I get for going cheap. Oh well. They are pretty noisy also, but thats what I expected since I bought them to move a lot of air. Sounds like a freaking jet turbine or something. Which is cool in its own regard :D. Would have been 5 eggs cept that one failed.
Good Value
Pros: -A Quad Core Phenom for $399? Amazing! -Good amount of RAM for the price. -Decently sized HD from a good company (WD) -3 USB ports vs the 2 that many companies do. -Decent onboard video from the Radeon. -Battery life is good on power saver mode. -Customer service is fairly good, they seem to be helpful. -Easy to access the laptop internals. -Extremely quiet! -Great screen!
Cons: And now for the cons... -Video card is really not up to any kind of recent games. -No Bluetooth (not really an issue for me) -No dual channel WiFi -Speakers suck, be aware! (Or should I say... speaker...) -The drivers on Acers website are out of date and some do not even work! I stuck a 500 gb 7200 rpm WD drive in here, and lo and behold the WiFi driver from Acers website DIDNT WORK. I will say, the customer service was able to tell me the specific model of WiFi card my laptop had, and I found them myself. -Can be very "disagreeable", as in WiFi has trouble coming out of sleep at times, can be very slow when its first starting up from a cold start, sometimes unresponsive. -No other real cons to speak of.
Overall Review: The stock laptop as it came worked well, after the bloatware was removed. From there it went downhill, when I put a new HD in it, from the get go it was trouble. I tried a clean install of windows and started running into driver problems, first with the WiFi. Then I installed a up to date version of the ATI Radeon drivers from online... nothing bad on Acer here, but ATI is a real PIA to work with, compared to my experiences with Nividia. Now all of this is not negative on Acer, out of the box it works, I cannot disagree with that. Just be aware that if you intend on upgrading the HD or doing a clean install, expect a lot of time getting it to work just right. All in all though, for my purposes, and for the price, it is a wonderful laptop, and I would suggest buying it! You will not find a better laptop for this price.