aspire (Acer Aspire 5715Z-1A2G16Mi)

Member Name: techno_man_37

Product:	Acer Aspire 5715Z-1A2G16Mi
Date:	30/11/08 (337 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: price

Disadvantages: a bit basic

This acer aspire carries acers so called gemstone design. This is a new design of laptop from acer and is being used in more and more of their laptops because of its popularity with customers. It does have split opinions however, some love it and some people really cant stand the look of it. I however think its great, its black and cream colour, with a lovely glossy lid looks cool and very neat and tidy. Also what I like about this Is its clearly a design that acer has come up with and kept, and it clearly represents their company. a lot of laptops from other manufacturers just look the same as others and you cant tell what brand they are, this however, much like the look of apples imacs you can tell they belong to which company.

The laptop is of an average size, its 36.6 cm wide, 27.4 cm in length and is 4.3 cm in height. So its not really the thinnest laptop ever and in my opinion the base of this one seems a bit too chunky for the laptop its self.
Its screen is of an average size too, it has a 15,4 inch screen which also features active matrix technology, this is being used by so much more laptop manufacturers nowadays as it makes the screen lighter, therefore making the laptop lighter, is makes the image quality so much better than a normal TFT screen and it also makes the response time a lot better, which makes videos look sharper, photos look sharper and game playing look better than ever before.

The installed ram on this is a reasonable 1gb, it isn't the best amount of ram on a laptop however its pretty average and you can get good performance out of 1 gb of ram.
Also if the 1gb of ram isn't enough for you (and it probably wont be in a lot of cases) then you can easily upgrade your ram to 4gb. This will just make everything even faster than it already is, so if you so really need your laptop to be a bit faster then you have got this option at a later date. This is really good because what tends to happen is that as your laptop gets older, and your add more programs and files, it eventually gets slower and slower, this is just something that happens, so having this extra 3gb of ram available to be installed into the laptop means that if it does start to run slower than you want it to, then you can easily have extra ram installed. A bad thing about this option though, is that it can be costly to do, especially if you cant do it your self and you might have to pay a computer technician to do the work for you.
Also a bit of a glitch is that it could, and I do say could, void the warranty, now I am unsure about the warranty of this specific laptop however it usually goes, if you alter any setting of the laptop by unscrewing things inside of it, then usually the warranty goes, as if it no longer works it could be your fault. So this is something to think about and look into before you start altering things inside the laptop.

In terms of extra features this laptop is pretty good, it not only has a pretty good web cam installed in the top of it, but it also has a 5 in 1 memory card reader. The card reader read any of SD Memory Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard, xD-Picture Card, and the web cam, which isn't great quality but its still a webcam. These extra features if bought separately would cost about £50, so its great to have these things built into a laptop.
In terms of portability this laptop isn't the best, its quite large compared to the portable laptops you can buy today that are specifically designed for this. Its also relatively heavy and weighs 2.8kgs. It battery life is the best out of its lack of portability though as it can last around 3 hours, which is reasonably good for any laptop, especially one which isn't custom built for portability.

Altogether this is a good laptop, but really its quite basic, it has good features built into which make it better value for money. A good thing about it though is that you can easily get one of these for just £350, and with all its features this is a really cheap buy.

Summary: good cheap laptop

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