My 15.6” Compaq Presario CQ60-404CA broke down the other day leaving me with no choice but to shop for a new laptop so I could continue on with my online ventures. I ended up picking up a new Acer laptop over the weekend (April 16, 2011) from BestBuy for $505.33 ($449.99 + $1.20 + HST 54.14). The original price was $499.99 which the saving in my case was $50.
I have always had a good experience with Acer as that was one of the laptops I owed few years back, the one I had was Acer Aspire 3680. That undoubtedly led to my decision on buying another Acer. When it comes to buying a laptop, I believe most of the people go with brand and functionality, but for my purposes, first thing I look at is price then reliability. For the money I spent on this laptop as well as my past experience with this brand and the specs, I think it was heck of a deal, read below specs and let’s compare.
Once I decided on my budget ($500), next thing I looked at was the specifications. This Acer Aspire 5736Z series laptop is powered by an Intel Pentium processor (T4500) and 4 GB of DDR3 SDRAM, I believe the RAM is expandable to 6GB. Like all other laptop, this one comes with 8X DVD Super-Multi Dual Layer Drive which if you don’t care about Blu-Ray; that’s top of the line DVD player in my case. The big hard drive of 750 GB is really a bonus, what I did was as soon as I set up the system, I immediately created a New Partition or Volume. I named the new B drive “Data”; it’s strictly for family photos storage. One thing I noticed though was although it claimed to have 750 GB but when you look at the size of the drive under my computer, it says only 680 GB. I later found out that the difference between the 2 numbers is a reserved drive which I believe is used for recovery in a case of system crush.
The other things worth mentioning are the outputs and preloaded softwares. As far as outputs go, the HDMI connector is a bonus, for those enjoy watching movies from the laptop, you can connect your laptop right straight into your HDMI compatible TV and enjoy your big screen from the TV. Like all other laptops, this one comes with memory card reader (SD/MMC/miniSD/microSD), Webcam, 3 USB 2.0 ports, VGA, etc. which nowadays are the basic. On the software side of things, this laptop is preloaded with the Windows 7 Home premium edition. The other softwares worth mentioning is outdated Adobe Reader, McAfee Trial version, along with eBay international, koko, mywinlocker (not sure what these are for) and bunch of Acer programs.
In conclusion, I personally think this laptop blows anything comparable out of the water, so far the system has been running good (John: DA! didn’t you just buy this notebook 2 days ago?), the only thing I haven’t tested is the battery life. But I will keep this post updated when I come across any problems. How about you? Did you buy the same one? Let’s talk about it and tell us your experience.