Gaming Is this laptop a good deal?

[Tokyo Jihen]

Black Friday is coming up, and I'm thinking it's a perfect opportunity to buy a laptop. One particular laptop that caught my eye was the Acer Aspire. Retail price is $699 but on Black Friday it's on sale for $499. I don't know much about computers, but is it a good idea to just purchase this laptop now? I won't be using it until next school year, but I'm afraid there won't be as good a deal between now and that time. What do you think about Acer laptops? Good laptop for the price?

Thanks.

 

[Bently]

Depends what you're going to use it for. Games, Movies/Shows, Rendering, school work? or etc.

 

[IgiveUgas]

Acer Laptops suck IMO. Cheaper parts, don't last as long. I've never known anyone who was happy with their purchase after 6 months. Just like emachines, you get what you pay for

.

 

[Joe88]

cpu is very good but gfx is absolute trash so dont expect to play any big games on it

 

[OneUp]

It's good as long as you don't wanna play games on it.

 

[Advi]

The specifications are pretty good, for the six months that computer will last you.

 

[Tokyo Jihen]

Wow, glad I consulted you guys beforehand.
I'm not a hardcore gamer; the most demanding game I will be playing is probably Warcraft III, haha. Otherwise, I'm going to use it primarily for the internet, watching movies, listening to music, maybe all at the same time. But nothing like editing movies and pictures. Just college/school purposes.

What brand would you guys recommend? Asus? Also, do I really need a Core i5? Would a Pentium Dual Core handle my needs?

 

[kai445]

Whoa! Buy an Acer? Might as well just buy a box of razorblades and start cutting yourself now, cause you are in for a world of pain. Better just end it all and kill yourself instead of buying an Acer.


...


On a more serious note, the people telling you not to buy the laptop don't have a clue. Lets look at the facts:

- Acer has the best reliability among laptop brands as per Consumer Reports.
- The laptop has specs that are perfectly suited (in fact, more than necessary) to everyday tasks, such as surfing the internet, playing music, watching videos.
(Core i5? Awesome for a laptop. 4GB Ram? 500GB Hard Drive? 802.11n? All good.)
- The laptop isn't a gaming laptop, it has Intel Integrated Graphics (which is not good!), but it appears to have 128MB of Dedicated Video RAM (which is good!). You will be able to play Warcraft III just fine, it's an eight year old game. Newer games, you may be running at reduced resolution or low detail, but not a big deal.
- You seem comfortable paying that price, and the black friday price seems quite decent. Not amazing, but not terrible either.

I'd say you should be able to buy it confidently.

 

[Rydian]

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?ca...7&card2=187
Both those cards can come with 256 megs of video ram on them.
But the second one is over twice as fast as the first.

More ram on the videocard allows you to run the game at a higher resolution, with larger textures.

Games used to recommend a certain amount of ram on the card because it's an indicator of the card's AGE, not always the power, and most games won't work with cards older than a certain limit, which depends on the game.

 

[Originality]

Acer Laptops suck IMO. Cheaper parts, don't last as long. I've never known anyone who was happy with their purchase after 6 months. Just like emachines, you get what you pay for

.

I stand to the contrary. My dad's Aspire 5740 is doing very well even to this day, and we've had it for the better part of a year. He originally bought it because it would be perfect for his chess program (which needs a lot of CPU power) and also has a decent battery life (up to 4.5 hours, depending on settings) because of the Intel IGP. The AS5742 is just a slightly more up-to-date version of the same laptop, with almost identical specs. The difference is that mine has 3GB of RAM and an Intel GMA 4500HD. They don't specifiy the exact IGP in the 5742 anywhere that I've looked so far, so I don't know if it'll be the same GMA 4500HD or the slightly more powerful GMA HD. What I do know is that mine can handle Borderlands on low graphics fairly well, so it'll be fine with most older games.

On the other hand, I've seen 2 people recently having problems with their Acer laptops. Both are a completely different series to mine, and have completely different problems. That's not an indication that "Acer are sucky and use cheap parts and will give you any amount of grief", just that they seem to have some problems in their factories. More research into Acer tells me that most people are perfectly happy with their Acer laptops, whilst occaisionally people have small problems, ranging from a faulty keyboard to a flimsy hinge to minor but consistent graphical glitches. There are some people whose Acer laptops also fail entirely, yet these problems are always isolated cases and not common amongst any specific Acer laptop series. Something that is consistent is that Acer's customer support seems to be rather difficult to work with, but I've heard the same about Dell and HP customer support, so it seems pretty much an industry standard.

 

[Tokyo Jihen]

Hm. Well, I've decided to pass on the deal. I did some searching and found this, which sort of bothered me. I guess I'm waiting until the summer for those back to school deals instead; I think I'll opt for an Asus or Toshiba. Thanks for the replies guys, helped me a lot.

 

[kai445]

Here's the consumer reports reliability index, it extends to purchases through 2010, and has a larger sample size (43,000 vs 30,000) than the squaretrade report.

http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/3937/la...reliability.png
(Original Link: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electro...eliability.htm)