Acer Aspire 5742

Having had a HP laptop for only a couple to three years the poor thing died on me, apparently it was a known fault and the motherboard had warpped due to over heating (my previous review was for said HP laptop).

So I had to scoure the market and find myself a new Laptop, this is some job with all the choice and specifications out there.

I had initially set my mind on a 17 inch screen samsung, but you have to way up the options big screen smaller storage space or slower CPU or indeed less memory.

Taking into account all this I decided a normal 15.5 inch screen would surfice considering I would get windows home priemium edition, the i5-480cpu which is mid range for that cpu and a 320gb hard disk.

I also got a laptop bag in red and black as freebie when I bought the laptop so it was a sweetener, having taken my time and looked for a few weeks waying up all the pros and cons and options available and making sure I had at least some sort of future proof laptop I opted for the acer aspire5742.

I was a bit wary having never had an acer before and really being a lover of Samsung, most of my gadgets such as phone digi cam, hifi tv etc are all samsung of which I sware bye being a good robust make.

I couldnt find the right cocktail of elements I wanted, being a tad vain I fell in love with the red colour and detail on the Acer, being a dark rose red and aluminium cross pattern detail on the screen backing and around the keypad.

I found this quite stylish and easy on the eye, the keypad is also a full keypad with the number block to the right like a normal keyboard on a PC, the keys are softouch and very tough robust in design.

The keys are space very well not a unique design but usefull for sumone with large fingers, around each button there is a 2mm gap hence the button dont touch.

You cant really miss hit one, well you can but it would be purposefull and after a bit of ware and tear you wont find them leaning on each other and end up pressing two buttons instead of one, unlike the old hp that lost the q button after having it a few days.

The cpu is magnificent and one thing I notice is the fan it isnt on constantly like my old HP laptop it come on when your beefing up the work rate and the cpu is working for you and it is quiet.

The laptop starts up like most others with a fan burst and windows 7 kicks in which is also fast you hear the click of the dvd (one regretable element is I didnt get a blu-ray) although I can upgrade it easy enough as its a plug and play dvd.

the fan then slows down to near silent and your at the login screen !! fantastic.

The hard drive makes no noise at all it is indeed silent all you can tell it is running by is the blue light flickering to tell you its spinning, which is aother classy element of this laptop.

Its red and black with fine detail, the power, hard disk, caps lock and battery lights are all neon blue and the wifi is orange as is the battery light when its nearing empty so a good warning and they are easy to see even in daylight.

Phisically the laptop is quite light like most modern gadgets I suppose its a must, easy to carry and well protected in the manufacturers specially made bag.

Other thinmgs to note is the HD screen a must in the high definition world we live in today and the hd intel graphics with its own memory , basically to not pause or stutter the laptop when you start a long film , dvd or even open youtube this makes it smooth and very media friendly.

The laptop has DDR3 4gb memory which is more then ample for me writing playing games watching dvds and surfing the net all can be done with ease, even all at once on the wonder machine.

More strings to its bow, it has 3 usb ports and 1 hdmi port, sockets for microphones and headphones a network socket cat 5 for phisically conecting to a network screen output for conecting to tvs or computer screens, projectors giving me the feeling this is an alround general device for all , educational, gameing business etc it will do it all.

The wifi is 802.11b/g/n so will connect anywhere from home to work hotspots or macdonalds and the connection is fast being the Acer Nplify version.

One missing function that totally passed me by was bluetooth which my HP had and was usefull, this laptop sadly hasnt got that function which is a shame as it would be 100% functional and complete with that small bit missing.

Finally the battery it last at least 4 to 5 hours depending on what you are doing, but charges very fast from empty it takes around an hour due to it being a 6 cell Li-Ion battery.

the laptop also conforms to the energy star standard which in the days of green thinking is a must.