Acer Aspire 5920

[kirennia]

Very good laptop for its price; I originally bought one for £430 and had to send it back...just before I took my replacement, I thought it wise to check up what other deals they had before taking it and found this for £500.

The processor for a laptop is bloody powerful, 2gig ram, 250gb HD which is pretty damn good, integrated geforce8600M 256mb...on a £500 laptop. I checked all the usual stuff like a decent 2.5 hour battery, webcam, SATA hd, 4usb slots, firewire, it's slightly heavier then other laptops which usually come in at around 2.7kg but then again, I'm sure I can live with an extra 300grams for what you get.

The only bad point is vista but then again, that's easy to rectify as linux gets more powerful every 6 months...ooh, and it aint the prettiest of things but then again, all of the paint which they used to use which faded over time has been replaced with plastic so it shouldn't wear down over time.

I was just astounded. When I read the spec, before I even got to the graphics card I was thinking it'd be worth the extra £70 but with that as well? Don't think I've seen better. And it's made by acer who are generally expectional at build quality.

Buy ACER 5920G-302G25MI | 15.4" laptop - Specification | Comet

note: It's brought down for £600 so might not be around for a long time.

 

[Kryten]

Aye, it's not half a bad spec.
I'd disagree on build quality though. Acer's are prone to heat issues, and even after about 5 years of successive products with the same fault, the hinges are STILL somewhere between useless and awful.
But, if it's a desktop replacement more than something on the road for the businessman, this is hardly likely to be an issue.
Vista isn't too bad on that sort of spec desktop but it does still struggle on some portables (not on mine, but it's exceptionally quick); it does so on Acer hardware due to Acer's (ALi) proprietary motherboards, the software is lacking a tad.
We go through a fair few hundred here on a monthly basis (I've a pallet of spares to sort through on Monday for Acer kit) and we generally stick XP on them, which gets the most from the system. Sp3 due soon too

So in general, an excellent find

 

[kirennia]

I do have to say, I'm going from a local schools network which was setup some three years ago by my dad with 30 of their laptops and every one of them has been perfect even with grubby school kids using them.

Fair play though, they aren't exactly going to be pushing the processors at all for their work.

Also, my old laptop was an acer which a friend of mine also had, both of which had lose connections on the screens which was an inherant fault with that model; they have since discontinued them and now only supply the new style ones which that is...

I'll let you know how it performs as I'm gonna be picking it up in.....ooh, I'm late, cya in a bit

 

[Kryten]

Aye, post some PCMark scores too out of idle interest
To be fair, for that price you can't really go wrong. End of the day I can sit here and pick holes out of any make or model, but nothing's perfect and I enjoy a ruddy good moan! :touch:

Favoured laptops here *in there complete state* are Thinkpads, which also have the best touchpads out of any laptop ever. But, to work on and rebuild they're shit and feels like you're reworking Duplo blocks.

I just like Dell for the "middle ground" - not too shabby for price or quality and lovely to work on. And of course cracking screens

Worst build quality by a LONG way has always been Fujitsu-Siemens machines. Something as daring as breaking wind near them often causes fatal cosmetic damage :| (slight exagguration)

What did suprise me however was RM's laptops (schools only). God daughter was given one, she's only 8 years old. For learning etc, which it worked rather well. However, much to my dismay, I went to see her a while ago, and found her jumping on it with full weight. Up and down, bounce, bounce bounce.
Not a spec of damage, not a scratch, not a pressure mark on the screen.


I still want a Panasonic Toughbook though (other than my own aging CF-28 p3 1ghz which serves as an indestructable mallet too)

 

[kirennia]

Part1:

Got the thing, first thing to do, make it look like windows 95 again, har! At least I've got my priorities straight ehh?

This one seems in good nick but when loading the first up for the first time, vista was using up over 930mb of ram....on nothing!

With things running, I've managed to knock it down to 800...should have it just below 700 before the day is out but it still suprises me that most laptop manufacturers put all of this crap on even if they're selling a laptop with 1gb of ram. I mean seriously, how can you justify putting vista on a laptop leaving the user with only 100mb ram to play with; you couldn't run most 1990's games with that little...

Luckily for me, I've got the 2gb, just thought I'd add a moan for good measure

 

[kirennia]

Part 2:

Managed to get the memory consumption to about 580mb from standing with as much as I could possibly turn off. It's still pretty much silent and even when running games at full speed, the thing doesn't seem to heat up. Maybe they've fixed that problem with their next gen laptops? It isn't quite as fast as I was expecting from other peoples tests; am wondering if the graphics card has been turned down at all; all software is up to date so that can't be the problem. As a benchmark, it's running C&C3 with everything on high at about 20fps but then again, I've heard that C&C3 runs lower then expected on DX10 machines.

I'm still going to put ubuntu on it as my developing software isn't running/debugging as fast as on my desktop so I think i'll have to before my demonstration on monday.

Overall, pretty pleased with the thing though; much much faster then my previous laptop at just £70 cheaper (debugging runs at approx 10-15fps instead of 1-2.

 

[rynnor]

Cool - that laptop looks great value - I think I'll pick one up for the Mrs tomorrow - any further updates on how its running now?

 

[Jonty]

Hi guys

If you're not bothered about gaming (and the 8600M isn't amazing if you like FPS games), then opt for the Aspirre 5720. It only comes with integrated graphics, and the hard-drive is around 120GB, but it's £70 cheaper at £430. If you want to save even more, there's another version with a slightly slower processor and 80GB hard-drive for for around £380.

Kind regards

 

[kirennia]

Cool - that laptop looks great value - I think I'll pick one up for the Mrs tomorrow - any further updates on how its running now?

Final part:
Sorry for the delayed response, not checked here in a few days.
My last laptop which had a lower spec processor (T5150 series instead of T7300) used to run with vista at around 680mb ish but this one I've got down to 580mb with nothing running other then the traditional anti virus, firewall etc. When you first get the laptop it runs at around 930 idle which just isn't good enough so strip out all the usual acer crap but keep the acer eAudio as it controls your external volume control

The laptop itself has been stable, not had any problems and the graphics card, although not perfect as you'd expect is actually quite good.

It's fast to load up, the touch pad stuff on the right is a nice toy if you have media player running, the webcam is good, the sound is much better then I've come across on other laptops although obviously not as good as real speakers and I've slowly grown to adapt to the keys and mousepad.

The mousepad is an ellevated one so you can sometimes press it when you don't mean to but I think that's just something which will sort itself over time.

The keys are soft but have a matt finish which I'm not too keen on, I prefer the shiny ones without this matt 'grip'. Again, I'm sure I'll get used to it though.

As for cooling, even when running games for a while, it seems to heat the surface underneath the laptop more then the actual laptop itself which is a good sign. Even then, it doesn't get that hot at all...

I'd definitely recommend it but you really have to strip out as many program as you can from acers startup as boy do they pile them on...

 

[rynnor]

Delivered 30 mins ago - now to start her up...

 

[TdC]

takes at least 12 minutes then

 

[rynnor]

takes at least 12 minutes then

Lol - just a bit - its one of those first boot up finish off install jobs...

And by god does it come loaded with a lot of fluff!

I'm also trying to work out whos internet connection its using - its not mine as mine are encrypted

 

[rynnor]

Oh anyone got a guide to stripping Vista down to improve performance?

There are lots on the web but I'd prefer a trusted one...

 

[kirennia]

Just off to the shops...will make a quick list when I get back

 

[kirennia]

Right, I can't remember all of the steps I took but I'll try and cover as many as possible. Please note, if you're uncomfortable doing any of the steps, ask before you do them; you can skip any of them that you don't want to do...

1)Uninstalling crap.

Control panel - programs and features; of all of the ACER stuff which comes with the laptop, I've got the 2 acer crystal eye webcam programs, eAudio Management (needed for your volume control), Acer Gridvista, Mobility center, acer Screensaver (oops, think ill get rid of that too) and Acer VCM. There are a shed load of unneeded things like the empowering technology which I didn't really see a use for and consume a lot of ram to run. Take a look at what you want from them and get rid of anything you don't want but be careful of removing stuff which is needed such as those things listed above.

2)Programs - startup.

Get rid of anything you want in there. Your antivirus/firewall will boot up on their own so don't need to be in there, anythingelse is just booting up using more of your CPU for potentially nothing. I like to tell individual programs to boot themselves up instead of having them do it in startup, hence my empty startup

3)start-run-type in msconfig-goto the startup tab

Do NOT remove things in here which you aren't sure of what they do. This is basically a hidden startup like in your programs dir but contains a lot of important stuff. To make it easier, I'll just list things which I've got turned OFF in there, don't remove anything which you're not sure you know what it is...

Acer tour reminder
Adobe acrobat
ALaunch
Launch Manager
Messenger
WR_PopUp
Orion

I'm sure there were a lot more I removed but having removed quite a lot of their free crap, they must've been taken off the list.

4)Flashy vista stuff.
Control panel-system-advanced system settings-performance settings.

I'm the sort of person who likes a minimalist desktop so some of these things aren't for you but they all help free up more of your CPU.

Basically, none of those tickboxes are a necessity but some of them are kind of nice to have. Of all of them, these are the only ones I've got ticked -

Show thumbnails instead of icons,
Slide open combo boxes,
Smooth edges of screen fonts,
Smooth-scroll list boxes,
Use a background image for each folder type,
Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop.





I'm sure there was a lot more I did but I can't remember for now; these are simple things along with keeping your desktop as clear as possible, keeping your anti virus/windows updates as up to date and not installing shareware stuff which help quite a lot in the long run.

Feel free to add any anyone

 

[rynnor]

Cool - thanks for your help