Rob's Blog

Buying a new laptop

I had a bit of a dilemma recently. I needed to get myself a new laptop and I wanted a MacBook Pro. However, I didn’t have a spare £1,700 knocking around for the 15″ model I wanted. So, what did I do? Did I rob a bank? Did I buy one of the crappier MacBooks? Or did I buy something wholly different?

I went the “buy something wholly different” way. Deciding that I didn’t have £1,700 to spunk on a laptop I looked at the alternatives open to me and came across the Acer Aspire 5612WLMi. It looked perfect and I could get it pretty cheap – the base model was about £500.

Now, call me a bit of a snob, but I’ve always thought of Acer as a bit of a budget manufacturer. However I’d ruled out HP (too ugly), IBM/Lenovo (too businessy) and Dell (never liked them) so was looking for alternatives. The price of the Acer was right (cheap) and the specs were pretty much what I was looking for.

So, I bought the base model – 512Mb RAM, Intel integrated graphics (I have my Xbox 360 for games), an Intel 802.11 a/b/g wireless card and a built-in 10/100 Broadcom ethernet port. I then went out and got myself some generic DDR2 RAM to bring the system up to 2Gb (extremely quick, painless and cheap) and a new hard disk (a 7,200RPM model with 80Gb of space). I also got myself a copy of MCE 2005 with the laptop. I’d spent about £700 in total and had a laptop that was more powerful than the Apple, with the exception of the graphics card.

I have to say I’m very impressed. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Acer, but when it arrived my choice was vindicated. A beautiful glossy 15.4″ widescreen display with a crystal-clear 1280×800 resolution. The brightness is fully adjustable and unlike many laptops I actually had to reduce it from factory defaults – a welcome change from the likes of HP for example on which, no matter how hard you try, you can never seem to get the display vivid enough. Yes, I know it’s only integrated Intel graphics (the Intel 945GM for those who are interested) – so any gamers out there are not going to like it – but if you just do word processing, web browsing and a spot of development (as I do) it’s absolutely perfect.

Next up, the keyboard. It feels great which again surprised me. Okay a little plasticky, but the feedback as you type is weighted almost perfectly. The only gripe I do have is that, for some reason, occasionally as I’m typing one of my fingers will clip the bottom-left edge of the “J” key. It hasn’t gone flying off yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. I don’t know if this is a keyboard problem or just my spacky typing fingers.

I’ve always found touchpads annoying – however this one isn’t bad. Before disabling it and using my usual USB mouse, I had a go with it and found it quite nice. It’s got the standard Synaptics control panel options like most (if not all laptops) but in terms of hardware I found the touchpad responsive, the two left-and right-click buttons to work well an the middle click to be fine. The four-way scroll buttons in the centre don’t work too well though – nowhere near as good as a scroll wheel. Perhaps this is just me, or a problem with software. Physically they work and are comfortable and intuitive; the software isn’t so much. One thing I’ll also add here is that, when typing, my right thumb would often scrape across the touchpad, sometimes selecting text I’m working on and leading me to type over it in the middle of a paragraph! Annoying! Hence turning it off and using my mouse.

The included DVD writer seems to work well – I don’t use it often but everything I have had to burn (the odd Linux distro, a Vista RC1 DVD and some other bits and pieces) has worked perfectly and completed quickly. It’s quite noisy though.

Overall though, noise isn’t an issue. At normal loads the fan is relatively quiet and although you can hear it, it is only a subtle hiss. Ramp up processor usage and the fan does kick in and become fairly noisy but this really has been quite rare for me. Watching movie files is fine, although playing DVDs was quite noisy due to the sound of the DVD drive spinning away. Otherwise though in general use the laptop is very quiet.

The Core Duo T2300 processor included has proven to be pretty powerful for me. Most of the time I’m running at it’s SpeedStep’d lower speed of 980Mhz rather than the default of 1.6Ghz. Even running FireFox, Visual Studio, Outlook, Word and some others simultaneously don’t seem to stress it out too much.

In conclusion? I love my new laptop. It’s fairly light, the display is great, for day-to-day tasks it works brilliantly and I know I’ve got processing power to spare for more intensive tasks. The only thing that I think it would struggle with is games – I’ve had no problem with video or DVD playback.

Battery life seems average for a laptop of this size; I get about four hours or so. If battery life is your thing then you’ll find plenty of sites for optimising this but I’m sure I could get a bit more out of it by turning bits off and reducing the brightness of the screen etc..

I’ve been running this laptop with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 since I bought it in August 2006 – with Vista right around the corner I’ll probably buy myself a copy and get that running on it.

Overall – highly recommended. I’m very glad I saved myself the £1,000 or so extra I was going to spend on a MacBook Pro.

Pros: Cheap, Beautiful display, Easily upgradeable, Decent performance.

Cons: Cheap-looking case, Plasticky feel, Intel integrated graphics, No Windows XP media included.

Further info:

Acer Website (UK)

Product Page (Acer Website)

Look for this laptop on eBay

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Hardware. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: Hardware, laptop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.