A good mid-range laptop (Acer Extensa 5610-101G12)

Member Name: oodlenoodle9

Product:	Acer Extensa 5610-101G12
Date:	11/04/08 (492 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, lots of good features and (so far) very reliable

Disadvantages: Graphics card is nothing to sing and dance about

I was given the snappily titled Acer Extensa 5610-101G12 for my 18th birthday as a good mid-range laptop to see me through university and the end of college. Now I don't know a vast amount about laptops, but by and large I have been very impressed.

First, the basics. Personally I reckon it looks a lot better than many laptops in the price range (which is obviously an important factor to consider!) but more importantly it is very easy to use with a comfortable keyboard layout and fairly good touchpad, although it still drives me nuts so I use a remote USB mouse most of the time. It even has extra "productivity keys" on the keyboard so you can quickly open your email, launch Internet Explorer and so on, but I personally never use them.

The battery life is a fairly average hour and a half to two hours, but this is governed by a neat little tool called Acer ePower Management. This allows you to fiddle with settings to squeeze the most juice out of the battery for whatever task you are doing - if you are just typing then you can set processor speed to minimum, lower the brightness of the monitor and switch off other power hungry features such as the wireless LAN.

The computer comes with built in wireless LAN (using SignalUp(TM) technology, whatever that means...) and also a built in mic so you can look like an idiot and talk to the computer should the need take you. The speakers are the usual laptoppy sort that aren't that good but do the job, and you get other gismos like a memory card reader, firewire, four USB slots and plenty of other sockety things that I don't really understand. Oh and Bluetooth.

All this is powered by a 1.66GHz Intel Centrino dual core processor and a gigabyte of RAM, which seems more than enough to do the job. I would however point out that I bought the laptop with Windows XP, so I don't know how it would cope with the more brain-power-hungry Vista.

Furthermore, this is not a particularly good gaming computer. The graphics card apparently does not support T+L shading, which basically means most modern games will not run on it. Also the DVD RW drive doesn't seem to be all that fast. Still, there are plenty of good old(er) games that will run fine on it and provide a dangerously effective distraction from work...

So far the computer has given me no problems, and seems to be pretty rugged when it comes to lugging it around. If you want a decent laptop that won't set you back too much hard-earned cash but has pretty much every feature you could possibly use (if you ask my *cough* expert opinion...) then you can't go too far wrong with the good old Acer Extensa 5610-101G12.

Summary: A good buy if you want a decent but not stunning laptop

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