Sexy laptop - Worth it?

I wouldn't go for Acer, if I had to choose myself. Just my opinion.

 

lol get a decent one with a proper graphics card...

 

Depends on what you want to do. The integrated video card in the processor is good enough if you don't play games or only old ones. It will save a lot of power and give a much better battery life without a good graphics card + the laptop won't get very hot and will have a longer life.

Edit: To the topic starter: what you want to do can be done with any laptop if you really want a laptop now I would go for a decent brand like Asus or Lenovo. It might have slightly lower specs for the same price but will be able to do what you want and will last much longer.

 

1366 x 768 resolution is the killer for me. I know it is hard these days but try to get one with a decent resolution- anything remotely academic (data reference, PDF reference for something else and actual entry/programming all on that?) is going to be horrific on a resolution that low.

Granted I am a couple of years out of high end computational stats but from the position I try to keep myself in I reckon at present the line between basic PC toy stats and the sort wanting a proper server/enough to do silly things in real time is big enough that it is probably not worth the hassle of getting a laptop to do both for (certainly I would sooner get a basic laptop and build a server to remote into/kick the funds to a couple of years on some computational cloud*). I am however not up to date with CUDA and stats and seen as it was about the only thing CUDA is good for it might be worth finding one capable of that.

*I feel bad for suggesting a cloud but this is one of the cases where they are good.

 

Acer is not what it used to be. They used to be really bad products. I think its really decent price for that rig and its got everything to serve you a good amount of time.

 

Funny, in my 4 years of work I can assure you that Acer is a lot better than Toshiba, HP, Packard Bell and such.

HP is the absolute worst, though. Motherboards go belly up most of the times because they turn into freaking ovens after 10 months.

Heck, I have two Acer laptops here at home which are still working majestically. And one has something like 6 years and is still used daily.

 

You can be certain of that, this Xmas I bought an ASUS laptop for my GF without hesitation Was really cheap. Only 500USD (without OS).

They're also really nice to work on.

I see quite some dead Acers, but compared to the ENORMOUS numer of sold Acer PCs, you can quickly understand that you see so many of them failed just because they're sold in REALLY large numbers.

That said, I still have something like 5 dead HP laptops in my lab for spares

 

For your needs, that laptop is all you need. For that price however... All I can say is that for that price, I want better graphics for games.

Ignore the anti-Acer comments. What matters most are the price, specs and the design of the cooling.

For your needs, you should be able to find a much cheaper laptop with a Core i3 or i5 and not see any loss in performance. You don't need good graphics for programming, just a decent CPU and a low price.

 

like the others have mentioned, you definately want to stay away from anything listing "intel HD graphics 3000" because it's nothing more than a graphics chip on the motherboard with no ram. systems featuring this chipset end up sharing the computer ram as video ram. try to find one that specifies that it has dedicated video ram of 512MB or 1GB

 

what's sexy about it?

plus why is the track pad on the left side? are you a lefty?

 

Well, it can play Skyrim on Low, so it isn't that bad for an integrated GPU.

 

What's so wrong with the graphics cards? He doesn't want to play games, so why would he need a better, battery-eating video card? The video card in this laptop will do what it will need to do and wil do it without problems. It's also not worth looking into laptops with a Nvidia GT520M or AMD's equivalent, since those are only slightly faster than the Intel HD3000 and better models use much more power. I would just stick with the HD3000 if you don't play games.

Still I wouldn't go for Acer though. Look into a nice Lenovo or Asus. They are great.