Thinking of Purchasing an Acer Laptop

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DamienThorn

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 28, 2004
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Hi all,

I'm looking to pick up a laptop for light office work (mainly word processing, surfing, listening to music, etc.) and writing papers and such. I'm not planning on playing any serious games, or anything like that. Is the laptop that I've chosen (listed below) a good purchase, or should I look for another one?

Acer Aspire 1690 (AS1692WLMI-XPH) Intel Pentium M 740 1.73GHz Centrino 2MB L2 Cache 533FSB, 15.4" WXGA (1280 x 800) TFT display, AcerR CrystalBrite Technology, 512MB DDR2533, 80GB HDD, DVD+/-RW,Acer CrystalBrite, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, LAN, 802.11g WLAN, Microsoft Windows XP Home; $1299 (Cdn).
 
Ok I have some questions for you first.
A) spending 1200 is ok with you right?

B) for that price if your willing to go with Newegg or even eBay you can get so much more laptop (Or better yet, next to newegg the best idea is to buy one from here or the Notebook Forums (you can google that)).

On B) I say this because for that price I say :thumbs down: Not a good deal. You have a great processor but the intel shared graphics, blah for 900 max you can pick a M6811 up off eBay and have

widescreen, DVDRW, ATI Radeon 9600, 80Gig and Athlon 64.

Now if Battery life is more important for the same price check out the Gateway m505 model. Its the exact same laptop above (packed different and has some nifty stuff on it) but instead of the Athlon 64 you have a Pentium M centrino package with a 1.4-1.5 rating.

Again if neither of those gets you there look at the dell i6000 series. Again for that price just here on the forums you can do so much better.

Thats my grab on it hope it helped. I honestly think Acer builds a good laptop but shared video is not something I would wish on anyone. Gaming or not get something without it. Theres to many options out there to settle for shared.
 
Spending the money is cool with me, but do remember that I'm talking Canadian funds; I don't want to have to ship something across the border because I'll get reamed by customs. I couldn't find anything on ebay that offered comparable specs without it having to come across the Canada/US border, and didn't see anything off dell, toshibas, or anyone elses' websites that offered a similar bang for my buck. Newegg isn't an option because they don't ship to Canada. I'm hesitant to purchase a used laptop, simply because I can't be certain of the condition of it, until it arrives at my doorstep, and I just don't trust people enough to spend over a thousand bucks on something and not be able to inspect if prior to giving them my money. If you could offer me some links to Canadian retailors, then I'd be happy to take a look at them!

 
for 1200 you could get a darn nice thinkpad on ebay (or employee discount of IBM or lenovo, if you have that hook up)
 
I think for $1299 CDN that is a pretty nice deal. The GMA900 graphics is not horrible. I like that Acer model a lot. You can find it with the ATI x700 but they cost upwards of $2000 CDN. I would say go for it. So long as you are not planning on gaming on it, it will do just fine.
 
Acer battery life is always a sticking point with me. I personally went for a Toshiba A85-S107 ($500 U.S.D. after rebates) and added 512MB ram after researching my options in more of the budget sector. But the Toshiba battery doesn't wow me either. In working on laptops over the years I have found that Acer's are pretty hit or miss affairs... when you get a bad one it will be pretty apparent but a good one will run forever.
 
I just bought the same laptop for $1200 on Ncix.com This laptop is really nice. GMA900 does a nice job as long as it is not used for gameing. I really like Acer software that comes with the laptop. The laptop is virtually soundless when CPU power is set to high or medium.
 
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