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Acer AS5552-7474 15.6-Inch Laptop

Posted at October 28, 2011 // Acer Laptop Reviews

Get more out of your computing experience with the Acer Aspire AS5552 Notebook delivering outstanding performance, great communication features and rich multimedia. Just open the lid to reveal the stunning 15.6″ HD widescreen LCD display that brings the Internet, movies and video games to life. Powerful Quad-Core processing, amazing connectivity, ATI Radeon™ HD Graphics and cool features makes this the perfect PC for multimedia enthusiasts and mobile multitaskers.

Get out of this world performance with an AMD Phenom™ II X4 quad-core processor and 4GB DDR3 Memory, accelerating daily needs with performance and responsiveness needed to download music, launch movies, chat and complete demanding tasks.

802.11b/g/n Wireless and Gigabit Ethernet LAN ensure you can connect quickly and stay online wherever you go.

Windows® 7 Home Premium makes the things you do every day easier and with Office Starter 2010, experience new ways to deliver your best work! Buy Microsoft® Office 2010 to activate a full-featured Office suite preloaded on this PC.

Enjoy cinematic brilliance on the 15.6″ HD CineCrystal™ widescreen LED-backlit Display with a true 16:9 aspect ratio and ATI Radeon™ HD 4250 graphics delivering crystal-clear images and brilliant color for today’s best entertainment.

Liberate the senses with vibrant audio that brings movies and music to life via built-in speaker and high-def audio support.

Go even bigger by easily connecting to your HDTV via the HDMI port, delivering crisp high-quality visuals and high-fidelity audio through a single cable.

Key Features

 

User Review by Matthias: This machine is as good as its specs indicate and the sales pitch claims.

I have three desktops using quad core AMD processors for my animation hobby and boinc projects. They run linux and I had been missing a pure windows machine as unless I am missing something I can’t get a virtual windows machine to do everything. Portability is a minor consideration for me but space and power consumption has become a consideration so I looked at laptops.

Acer AS5552-7474 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)

Personal Computers
Acer AS5552-7474 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)
  • $399.99 List Price

I needed all the basic features like webcam and mike and nothing like reading my fingerprint. And I come across this a decent speed quad core and a burning DVD drive. As I did not intend portable use as important I presume the relatively short battery time would be its major drawback for those who need laptops in business. If the blurb is the usual hedging saying “up to” a short battery time means it is significantly less in real usage.

May I suggest it is the best stay-at-home portable around?

Here I have a Phenom II x4 @2.2GHz and 4GB RAM. The least of my desktops is the original Phenom x4 @1.8GHz and 4GB RAM. That desktop does boinc full time as well as drives my TV.

Even though Windows vs Linux this is is noticeably faster although I cannot say the clock speed makes the difference. Granted there is no clear way to compare but …

I spent my first few hours cleaning up nagware (surprisingly little and what there was, was good stuff) and installing the apps I wanted like gimp, Povray and Firefox. Despite the oddly slow way windows does things the system felt more responsive than the 1.8GHz linux box. It is directly comparable to my Athlon x4 @2.2GHz with 6GB.

Once you have enough RAM to avoid swapping to disk there is no noticeable improvement to having more. The 8GB machine never seems to use swap. The 6GB never more than a few kB and even the 4GB machine almost never over 30MB. So unless you know for a fact you need more than 4GB you don’t.

I can only talk about “feel” as there are so many differences between what I have available that any attempt at benchmarking would be a joke.

One more thing the computer I use to drive my TV is a standard VGA output. It stutters when the file being read puts out about 2GB per hour, that is DVD size files. Not only is this machine overall faster and so should not stutter it has a video accelerator card and HDMI output which should avoid the possibility completely.

All this said let me make a pitch to buyers of this machine to google boinc and consider helping out science and math and maybe even help ET find a friend in this lonely universe with seti@home. Windows most certainly uses 1 gig of the 4 gigs of ram. 4 gigs total is more than adequate for a quad core and I know that from two machines. I seriously doubt 2 GB would be adequate but I cannot say for certain. (I am not a gamer. Nothing I say applies to aficionados of mayhem.) It is difficult to imagine what you can do to put a serious strain on four cores for more than a few seconds a week with the kind of apps that come with the machine like parts of MS Office.

Excuse, compilers come with the OS, so if you are a programmer you can put stress on the machine but if you are a programmer you aren’t reading this review to learn about stressing the machine.

Boinc projects merely use the unused clock cycles. When any app is in competition they retreat and give the other apps everything. You never notice they are there. But they will even use the cycles between keystrokes.


How about a gripe just to make this sound balanced? The G-D driver for the pointer pad does all kinds of neat things BUT it also activates on hover which is not possible to shut off by anything menu I have found and I have spent the most time looking for it. Hover means if you move the pointer to an active area and then pause to think about it, while you are thinking it will “click” for you. If you avoid an active by moving it to an app in the background to think it will “click” on it for you raising it to the front. In fact if you do anything you normally do it will do something for you that you do not expect.

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Toshiba Satellite L755-S5271 15.6-Inch LED Laptop

Posted at October 27, 2011 // Toshiba Laptop Reviews

Offering plenty of mobile computing power plus room to multitask, study, and play, the Toshiba Satellite L755 (model L755-S5271) offers a generous 15.6-inch display that’s great for doing more things at once–handling business at home or in the field, watching movies or playing online RPG games. And its high-gloss Fusion Finish in Matrix Silver will be sure to raise a few eyebrows.

It’s powered by a second-generation Intel Core i3 dual-core processor (“Sandy Bridge”), which provides breakthrough digital media management, content creation, and 3D gaming capabilities. And you’ll enjoy a rich set of new features for a stunning and seamless visual PC experience with no additional hardware.

This all-purpose, eco-smart machine’s stunning LED-backlit display is easy on the battery and provides 720p native high-definition resolution. It offers a plethora of multimedia features, including a SuperMulti drive that can handle all your DVD and CD formats, built-in speakers with Dolby audio processing, and Intel HD integrated graphics.

Product Features

Connectivity & Expansion

 

User Review by Gaben: I think this is a great laptop for me. It’s my third one; I had an earlier series but let a non-authorized tech “clean it up”, resulting in the purchase of a 2nd one, the Model I’m reviewing here.

The hard drive died within 2 weeks of purchase. I liked how it performed while it did, so I ordered my current L755-S5271 (Fortunately both Toshiba and Amazon [POP] have great warranty service).

I happen to like the larger monitor (approx 16″ diag)for artwork and multi-tasking. I like the 10key section on right side of keyboard simply because my fingers fly on it(accounting)as opposed to trying to use numbers on the alpha side. I like the slim design and light weight. The keyboard requires only a slight touch on each key, which has increased my wpm. The on-board mouse area can be turned on/off which is another good feature for me as I often plug in an art tablet and pen. When I use the laptop mouse, it’s surprisingly sensitive – allowing me minimal ‘finger use’ and virtually no clicking.

Toshiba Satellite L755-S5271 15.6-Inch LED Laptop (Grey)

hp, Personal Computers
Toshiba Satellite L755-S5271 15.6-Inch LED Laptop (Grey)

I’m happy with the processor (i3) because it works well, has the bugs corrected unlike the newer i5. I’m running Windows Home Premium 64bit (pre-installed). I like the USB w/’Sleep and Charge’ feature as it’s made a 7-outlet surge protector unnecessary (I can charge anything that plugs into it even while logged off) because I don’t charge all 7 things at the same time anyway. The battery life is approx 5.5hrs when no gaming is done, about 4 hrs if I play games. The 802.11N Wireless works everywhere I go, with a strong signal all the time. I rent less movies (DVDs)because the picture/definition on this monitor is very crisp and clear (both Toshiba and Amazon offer direct movie viewing,too). The sound/speakers are great on their own, even better if I plug in additional speaker system (this laptop feeds that with no problem whatsoever).

Bottomline, this is a great laptop for me personally.

I took time setting it up for my use, referring to User Guide more than I did with previous computers. If I found a different brand/model laptop of similar size and design – I’d probably be happy with it too – utilizing the User Guide saves mega-phone calls to frustrating Tech Support because I’m aware of how much I can do on my own now. The fact that Toshiba’s Guide is User-friendly helps a great deal.

I chose to use the laptop daily for one month before reviewing.

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