This beautiful machine is only let down by Vista (Acer Aspire 5315)

Member Name: kamal

Product:	Acer Aspire 5315
Date:	29/07/08 (565 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very stylish, Value for money, in-built webcam and mic, DVD writer, Sturdy

Disadvantages: Slightly jerky touchpad, 1 GB RAM is not enough for Vista

I bought this laptop as a present for my mom. When I bought it from amazon.co.uk in January 2008, the £349 price tag was quite good. I was bit reluctunt to go for celeron, but most reviews on this product convince me that celeron is ok for day to day use.

As this was for my mom, she requires it for skype and yahoo and she is not going to play 3D games on it, I purchased this laptop with 1.6 GHz Celeron, 120 GB HDD, 1 GB RAM and other stuff standard with 5315 model.

When I received the laptop, I was quite impressed with it's design, which was very good with Piano black outside cover and matt cream color keyboard with nice flourecent green logo on it. As I use dell inspiron, which is 3.5 kg, this one is quite sturdy looking and light weight at 2.8 kg. The keyboard feel is very good and wireless more powerful than my 3 year old dell. The screen is crisp and color is very vibrant.

After playing with it for a while, I found that Celeron and 1 GB RAM is not enough for Windows Vista. With nothing running, the memory usage is 90% and CPU is around 60%, which is very bad. But this is not laptop's fault.. Windows Vista is useless. I then visited some internet forums and found tips to disable some background task/services. This helped a lot, as memory usage came down to 70%, which is still high.

I then presented this laptop to my mom as asked her to get rid of Vista by contacting local technician. But she liked this new look and feel and kept vista on it. The performance is OKish but I never had any complain from actual laptop.

I also found the trackpad bit jurky, but its not that bad. The inbuilt webcam works very well.

I would not go for any celeron machine with less than 2 GB ram if I am using Windows Vista. But I am very lucky as I use XP and Ubuntu on my personal laptop.

Summary: Good laptop at this price, but get rid of VHP and install XP or Linux and it will fly.

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