Acer Aspire 5315

After knocking a full cup of tea over my laptop (and destryoing the insides completely) I claimed on my insurance and was sent an Acer Aspire 5315. It costs around £300 to buy in the shops, placing it at the bottom end of the price range for laptops at the moment, which vary from £300 to over £1000.

Basically the laptop comes with 1GB memory and 80GB hardrive. It has a 15'' screen and built in wireless technology.

APPEARANCE
It's quite bulky and very heavy, with the top half (screen and back of the screen) being black and the keyboard being a horrible grey colour. Personally I'm not keen on this contrast and think it would look a lot smarter if it was all black. When the lid is closed however it does look quite sleek. Apart from the bulkyness and contrasting colours I don't think this product rates too bad on appearance as I've seen much uglier models.

My laptop came with windows vista which at first is difficult to get used to since there are some fairly drastic changes from XP but one you get familiar with these changes I think Vista is actually much more pleasant to use.
Also installed when you purchase this laptop are the microsoft Office programmes (Word, Excel, etc) but they are only a trial version, and I think you have to buy the full version. If you don't want to buy the full version tho, there are very similar Microsoft programmes you can use such as Windows word processor and Windows Spreadsheet and they pretty much do the same job as Microsoft Office Programmes.
The Laptop also comes with:

ACER GAMEZONE - a selection of trial versions of games. Some are pretty decent and can be addictive, however they are only trial versions and you only get about 60 minuits to play each game before you have to buy the full version.

NORTON INTERNET SECURITY - Anti virus, but again a trial version

Software to enable you to watch DVD's (ACER ARCADE) and burn CD's.

USING ACER ASPIRE 5315
Overall I think is an enjoyable experience however I think it depends what you want to use a laptop for. I use my laptop basically for my uni work, surfing the internet and downloading music for my ipod on itunes. I also occasionly use it to play music and watch DVD's.

This lapto easily enables me to do all the above without any hassle, failry quickly and easily. All programmes run quite fast and take less than seconds to load up (compared to my brothers computer which takes ages to even open up IE never mind do anything else).

The keyboard is also quite handy in that it has shortcut keys. They are used by pressing the blue 'Fn' button and they appropriate shortcut key. They have small symbols / pictures on them which easily represent their function. For example you can change the brightness of the screen, turning sound on and off and control some of the functions in windows media player such as skip a song, stop, and play.

The laptop has two small speakers which are not really very loud and rather than controlling the volume with a volume turner (you know, like a small wheel that you turn to the left to turn music down, and the right to turn it up), but it has two small buttons which control sound.
These are above the keyboard and the button on the left turns music up, and the button on the right turns it down. This seems a little confusing, because when you press the buttong to turn music up (on the left), and small bar on the screen appears which estends its right hand side to represent the music being louder. Also when you do press either of the volume buttons it tends to take ages before they even have the desire effect. I don't mean to rant on about something as minor as volume buttons but they just seem to annoy me, there's nothing right about them!

Overall I'd rate this laptop 5/10. I find it too big, bulky and very heavy but I do like the shiny screen (exept when its bright and sunny!). However, like me, if you do not tend to move your laptop around anywhere, exept around the house maybe, then I wouldn't worry about the bulkyness of this laptop. If you'r a business person who travels around alot then I'd recommend something smaller and lighter.
I find the colours of the laptop also don't look nice at all, not together anyways. I think it should be all black and i dont see the point in the keyboard being grey. I think that's all I have bad to say about this laptop. Using this laptoo is quich and easy, especially if you only use it for basic things such as the internet, msn, and downloading music. It's also goo for watching DVD's, however the sound is rubbish do you'd probably need to plug it in to some speakers.

I think the cheap price (around £300) justifies the points I don't like about this laptop, and I would recommend it to anybody who wants a basic laptop for work, family or business or private use.