Please help me choose a laptop !

[aliferste]

Hiya - need to get rid of my desktop to make way for baby number two

I am torn between two laptops - got to be from amazon due to gift certificates been given.

Acer Aspire 5742Z 15.6 inch Notebook ( Intel Pentium P6100, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, DVD, Webcam, Wireless, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit)

or

Acer Aspire 5742 15.6 inch Notebook ( Intel Core i3-370M processor 2.4GHz, 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD, DVD, Webcam, Wireless, Windows 7 Home Premium)

They are both £379 - should I be sacrificing hard drive and an extra gig of ram for a slightly faster and newer processor? I do plan at some point to buy some external storage to store photos and stuff. Or is there another laptop that is better than these two on Amazon - due to it being just past crimbo and having to buy an amazing amount of new baby stuff (I thought nesting was all about cleaning as opposed to this "new" style nesting that is all about decorating the whole house) my absolute and total limit would be probably £400.

Meant to add - wont be playing any games, will be for watching movies and listening to music - will use it for the odd bit of photo editing (nothing major) and occasionally might convert an AVI file to DVD.

Advice?

its a difficult choice as there is the 64 bit /32 bit OS thing also. If it was me I would buy the i3 and install 64 bit win7 and eventually upgrade the ram to 4 gig. The i3 is also hyperthreaded so you get 4 threads instead of 2. CPU wise the i3 is a lot better

[Delta Whiskey]

I'd buy the i3 model. It's faster and runs cooler than the P6100. I don't think you'll notice the difference between 3Gb and 4Gb of RAM for the sort of tasks you mention. External storage is cheap now so the 320Gb hard drive is a non issue too.

[Uncle Peter]

I would not buy an Acer at all unless they've vastly improved their quality control and customer service within a very, very short space of time!

[Tezcatlipoca]

Originally Posted by ooogemaflop

its a difficult choice as there is the 64 bit /32 bit OS thing also. If it was me I would buy the i3 and install 64 bit win7 and eventually upgrade the ram to 4 gig. The i3 is also hyperthreaded so you get 4 threads instead of 2. CPU wise the i3 is a lot better

Both come with Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Although the page name for the i3 doesn't say "64bit", it does say it in the "Technical details"

arrrrrr didnt look that far

---------- Post added at 17:09 ---------- Previous post was at 17:08 ----------

that being the case there is no comp

[alferret]

Originally Posted by Uncle Peter

I would not buy an Acer at all unless they've vastly improved their quality control and customer service within a very, very short space of time!

Nowt wrong with Acer my friend, we have 4 in the house the oldest is about 3yrs and none have issues.

[aliferste]

Thankyou for the replies folks - They really helped

[Uncle Peter]

Originally Posted by alferret

Nowt wrong with Acer my friend, we have 4 in the house the oldest is about 3yrs and none have issues.

Sister has 2 in her house, both bought 12 months ago and both suffered a failed motherboard. One of them has been replaced twice: the first replacement was a shoddy refurb with a scratched lid and worn track-pad. No excuse for sending something like that out. Similar experiences with one of our clients when we took their support contract over, needless to say they weren't selected as preferred vendor again!

[Lord Nikon]

Having dealt with multiple Acers that have had issues with the reliability of the southbridge, losing access to the optical drives, etc, I won't touch Acer again with a barge pole. I like reliability, warranties are ok, but I prefer not to have to use them. The last 2 I had I scrapped.

[aliferste]

Is not the case though that you will always find some folk that swear a certain brand is bad as they have had a horror story - things go wrong with stuff its a fact of life - I reckon that if U had posted here about a Samsung laptop a few folk would have been telling me to steer clear of them as well

I wonder if I should start a thread asking folk what their opinions are of acer laptops ?

[Lord Nikon]

In laptops I have / have had 2 Acers, 2 Toshibas, a couple of Dells, Gericom, Asus, Packard Bell, HP, Compaq, and have an Alienware on order.

in order -
Acer - both failed, southbridge faults on both, machines several years apart, different chipsets, problem is build / assembly quality.
Toshibas - 1 cracked screen (got in the way of a flying phone, not mine I will add) and a dead optical drive - old age.
Dells - no problems, sold em on.
Gericom - only reason it's not in use is a dead cooling fan, just waiting for a replacement.
Asus - no complaints, gaming spec laptop from bestbuy US
Packard bell - sold on, no problems.
HP - prone to graphics BGA Problems, bought as scrap, reflowed, fitted new screen, been reliable ever since.
Compaq - as above
Asus EeePC900 - slow as hell under windows, fast enough under linux, currently on ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition.
Alienware - not got yet, review can and will follow.

The only laptops I have had that haven't been worth repairing when a fault occurred outside warranty have been the Acers. (Repaired / repairing a couple of sonys that have been a pain to get parts for though.)

[damien c]

I use to have to deal with faulty laptops when I worked for comet and I must say most were Fujitsu's and Acers but my mum, has had a Acer for about 5 years never had a issue with it until she spilt coffee on it then it started playing up but it is now used by my sister and still running ok'ish.

I had a Packard Bell Laptop that went faulty within 30 days of buying it, that put me of them but as of late I think they have got there acts together and they seem to be fine although iirc HP, Compag and Packard Bell are all the same company.

My dad has a Toshiba which he has had now for about 3 years been fine ever since he got it, apart from the HDD failing so I stuck a ssd in it and it's fine now.

To be honest any brand can go faulty but the worse I have had to deal with is Fuji and won't buy one for myself.