First time Acer Owner, December 28, 2010

By Ray C (Arizona) –

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Acer AS7741-7870 17.3-Inch Laptop ( Black) (Personal Computers)

First time Acer owner. For years I’ve owned nothing but HP units, and for years I put up with the same old problems. What stands out most for me is the “speed” of this processor. From complete shutdown to up and ready to go is at least three times faster than what I’m used to. Keyboard took a little getting used to as the layout is different than HP’s,but feels solid. Very quiet and runs cool. Haven’t used it as a “laptop” so can’t comment on battery life, only drawback so far is that I don’t have a wireless printer and the USB ports are near the front on either side. The printer cord competes with my wireless mouse for space, but is a minor nuissance and will be corrected once I upgrade my printer. So far this Acer has proven to be an excellent unit, especially for the price.

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very happy, January 9, 2011

By Doug192 –

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Acer Aspire AOD255-2331 10.1 inch Netbook (Black) (Personal Computers)

I bought this for my daughter for christmas, and had it for a week or two now. It is amazing, love that it has Windows XP on it, don’t need that fancy shmancy operating software, it’s just operating software. I have XP on my home computer and for my 13 year old daughter, I dont think she really cares or knows the difference, she is just really happy she has a netbook. Took a little time to get used to the pad instead of the mouse, but you get over it, or you can attach a mouse using USB. This seems like the only netbook model from Acer where you can upgrade memory up to 2GB(around 30 bucks), so at least there is options to expand. WiFi picked up my wireless router no problem and webcam worked great too. Nice and light little machine. I was worried with the speed of WiFi, but it was just as fast if I had ethernet cable attached. Can’t think of anything else, I will update this review in a couple weeks to add more if I forgot. Very pleased with it, though the only bad news is that everyone else wants one now too.

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The Netbook is for Professional Users Only, December 12, 2010

By GRES Professional –

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Acer Aspire AOD255-2331 10.1 inch Netbook (Black) (Personal Computers)

I have been purchasing a “Acer Aspire AOD255-2331 10.1 inch Netbook (Black)” from VA seller though Amazon… the item was deliver in less then 48 hours, brand new, fully sealed with all the factory components. The Acer Netbook D255 are Small, Light, Thin, Quiet, Advance, Fast – thanks to The Best Operating System Ever – Windows XP! Battery hold up to 6 hours. All components can be easy changed: RAM up to 2G, Hard drive up to 500G… My recommendations is to Delete factory installed the additional software, which are make the PC operating slowly. The Point of this Netbook is the Windows XP interface, because all other models and makers use the Slow and Broken systems such as Windows 7 starter… P.S The Acer Aspire ONE D255 is The One of The Best Netbooks You Can Buy, it is a Good Value for The Price.

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Grandma loves it!, December 26, 2010

By Millan S Patel –

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Acer AS7741-7870 17.3-Inch Laptop ( Black) (Personal Computers)

Bought this computer ($600) for my mother-in-law for Christmas 2010 as her old Acer Inspire 5000 was getting quite finicky after 5 years. She loves it! I am typing this review on it’s best feature – the keyboard…its keys click quietly but enough to let you know exactly whether you hit the key or not. Most computer keyboards don’t give you this quality of tactile feedback resulting in a lot of missed typos. It also has a number pad to the right which I like. The screen is extra wide which is Grandma’s favourite feature – along with the mouse pad having an actually useful scrolling thingy down the side and being sensitive to zooming and pinching with your fingers. The screen is just as tall as her old laptop which is a relief (watch out, some of the wider screens scrimp on height and don’t tell you since they only report the diagonal dimension). The laptop takes 2 minutes to boot up, no dead pixels on the screen, is very fast for everything, Windows 7 is much better than previous versions and the wireless worked flawlessly the first time out of the box. Negatives: underneath warmth is not as great as with many other laptops but my left leg still gets toasty; the palm rests are warm which kind of bugs my wrists after a while; speakers produce tinny sound, screen colours are sensitive to vertical angle so you have a narrow zone of about 15 degrees up or down where everything looks normal (side viewing angles are wide). Bottom line: ready to go almost right out of the box, fast machine, great keyboard, monitor viewing angles need improvement on otherwise excellent screen.

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Excellent Laptop, great price, December 10, 2010

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black) (Personal Computers)

Bought this laptop for about $450, free expedited shipping from Warehouse Sur+ (Amazon seller). Arrived late due to FedEx, not the fault of Amazon, Warehouse Sur+ or Acer, of course. It was double boxed for shipping, arrived in excellent condition. Excellent finish which makes smudges hard to see. Screen is nice and big, crystal clear. We have 4 Acer monitors and all work very well. Not a single issue with them and two are several years old, so we were pretty sure Acer would make a good laptop as well. The laptop comes with Windows 7 Home Premium but no DVD for it so you can’t reinstall easily. The key code for it is on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop, so if you get an OEM Windows 7 DVD that key should work to reinstall Windows 7. It also comes with some craplets, but you might be interested in McAfee’s antivirus (we weren’t, we use Microsofts Security Essentials, free download from MS with an authenticated Windows system). We reformatted the hard drive into multiple partitions and installed Windows 7 64bit Ultimate (we use BitLocker drive data encryption for data on the laptop and on the USB drives). The reformat and reinstall worked just fine (and no craplets!). Since there is no disk with the system, there were a lot of missing drivers (for the network card, wireless device, several Intel drivers, the camera, etc). All were easy to find at the Acer web site (get them beforehand, unless you have another computer to download with). Once we added the network driver, we could instantly see the local network computers and printers, and internet. Once that was found, we went to Microsoft Updates and that seemed to find most the other drivers for updating, including the video card drivers. The Acer website for the AS5742Z lists drivers for both AMD video cards and nVidia, although you probably don’t want or need both, and they are large files. The Microsoft Update website detected and installed the appropriate video driver, which makes life a lot easier. If you decide you want to install Windows XP (we tried just to check if it works) it does run fine, although we did have to go into the BIOS at bootup and change the SATA setting to IDE. The default value crashes XP during installation. That’s a minor issue, since Windows 7 is so much better anyway. If you use the normal 32 bit XP, you won’t use all of the 4GB of ram; you need the 64 bit operating systems to do that, which is why Acer provides the Windows 7 64 bit version. The laptop has 3 USB ports, two on the right side, one on the left. We put USB thumbnail drives into them all to test them and had no issues. We tried the wireless network, it was fine. We also connected to our 10/100/1000 wired network, and the laptop transferred a large file at the full 1Gbps speed. We then tried a wireless modem from Verizon, and it also worked as expected. The keyboard is very nice for a laptop. The mouse pad on the laptop is ok, but we prefer a normal mouse. We put in a USB mouse made by Roswell (a cheapo one for $4) and it worked right away. The 4GB of RAM were fully accessible, thanks to the 64 bit operating system (both on the OEM version it came with and our own Win7 64 Ultimate). The only thing we will get for it is a car charger. We have a standard laptop briefcase, it fits into that fine. Overall, we are delighted with this laptop and expect to buy another one in a few months.

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Light, speedy netbook, November 24, 2010

By J. Beams “JB” (Austin, TX) –
  

This review is from: Acer Aspire AOD255-2331 10.1 inch Netbook (Black) (Personal Computers)

Picked this model up locally on sale (D255-2331). It’s a nice, light, fast little laptop. I was concerned the 3-cell battery wouldn’t last long enough for daily use, but if the backlight is turned down you can get 5 or so hours out of it. Initially when I first charged the battery it wouldn’t get past 96%. I let it run for a day and discharged to about 10%, then let it charge overnight and now it’s saying 100% charge. Acer puts minimal bloatware on this machine, which is nice. It even comes with some actually useful apps pre-installed (Skype, McAfee, MS Works). There were a TON of Windows updates that were needed though once I got it on the net. The BIOS was also outdated. The network driver caused one bluescreen once, which is what prompted the BIOS udpate. The driver on their site claimed I already had the latest version though. Speed-wise I’ve had very few issues and I’ve been impressed with how fast this netbook actually is (even with only 1GB of RAM). Web pages load quickly and applications are fast. I installed MS Office 2007 and it loads just as fast as my desktop machine. It’s also worth mentioning that YouTube videos play well. I’ve also played some .wmv videos through Windows Media Player and they play well with minimal CPU usage. Hard drive is quiet and bottom of the netbook is somewhat warm. There is a small fan and vent on the side. The fan is pretty quiet (can only hear it in a quiet room). Keyboard is useable, though my hands do notice it is a little smaller than full size. Multi-touch mouse pad works well. The mouse buttons are a bit hard to press at first, as well being right at the edge of the laptop, but after some getting used to it is now acceptable. Speakers are adequate. Not real loud, but good enough for normal use. The wireless card picks up my home and work networks and connects to them quickly. For example I can get a 144Mbps link to my Cisco router about 25 feet away through 2 walls. There is no WLAN on/off switch, but you can control it via Windows or the driver software. By default the radio is set to be always on at max power, but you can always get a little more battery life by turning this down as well. One thing I don’t quite get yet is when the system goes to sleep when the lid is closed it doesn’t always wakeup automatically when the lid is reopened. Sometimes it does it on its own, sometimes I need to press the power button. Not a big deal though. Overall I’d recommend this laptop to anyone wanting a small light daily-use laptop for simple common tasks.

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Acer AS7741-7870 initial impressions…., October 31, 2010

By Robert R. Payette (Preston, CT USA) –
  

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: Acer AS7741-7870 17.3-Inch Laptop ( Black) (Personal Computers)

My Acer AS7741-7870 was purchased from Amazon was delivered at noon yesterday October 30th. We ordered it on late Thursday with next day shipping by FedX. We had ordered a similar model (the AS7745-5632) from Wal-mart, using their site to store shipping. It came in on time but DOA…would NOT turn on ‘. We had mentally “geared up” to the new computer and the work that’s involved in switching, which is why we did a direct shipment using Amazon the 2nd time out. I’m a moderately experienced PC computer user. I’ve had a blog for the last several years, have designed and implemented the local Town website, and currently do the websites for our local Parish and two camping clubs. The computer this new Acer is replacing is a Toshiba notebook that’s about four years old…it was designed for Windows XP, but was upgraded to Vista shortly after purchase. That was a pretty basic Satellite but she provided good service over the years. Regarding the Acer: We spent several hours setting up the various programs I use. Everything worked with the exception of a legacy Daytimer 2000 which didn’t surprise me as I think this is a 16 bit program. We had shoe-horned it into running on Vista, but Windows 7 64 bit was having none of it. All other legacy programs to include Adobe Acrobat 6 and NetObjects Fusion installed and work just fine. This machine was a bit light on included software, but it was also light on bloat-ware so it evened out. I’m very impressed with the keyboard “feel”..it’s a pleasure to type on with good tactile feel and response. The “delete” key in front is a tad small and not where I’m used to but it’s just a learning curve thing. I’m happy with the visuals, but did notice in running some YouTube video’s that they weren’t as sharp as I’d hoped they’d be. The programs load quickly and it seems to have enough horse-power to do anything I’ll be doing. That includes the manipulation of some graphics, multiple programs running and uploading to servers for the websites. I’d have preferred it to have some USB ports in the rear of the machine…it has two on each side. It also does not have a volume wheel in the front which I had gotten used to with the Toshiba; you have to use the Volume on your external speakers or up and down arrows on the number pad. All in all: VERY happy with the machine and with the service from Amazon. For the price ($679.99) it’s a lot of computer and I feel a good value for the money. Robert R. Payette, October 31st, 2010 [...].

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Fast CPU + Beautiful Display + Low Price, November 21, 2010

This review is from: Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black) (Personal Computers)

This is an amazing laptop. Screen is crystal clear and very bright. The top cover and spots where your wrist sit have a nice texture to them making fingerprints and smudges hard to see. The p6100 is a great budget processor. This beats down the similar price athlon II mobile processors and seems to be ahead of the old core 2′s in benchmarks. The Battery life seems to be about 3.2hours while browsing the net and working with outlook and word. Keys have a great feel and the way it is designed, you really cant get food or other small objects caught under them. This laptop does have 3 usb, 1 on the left and 2 on the right. Highly recommended!

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Very impressive laptop for the price!, October 29, 2010

By Geoff “Maine Fiction Fan” (Maine, United States)

This review is from: Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black) (Personal Computers)

I’m a somewhat advanced computer user and had been looking at laptops for a while before buying the Acer AS5742Z-4685. I dug into all of the specs of about 6 different models and zeroed in on this one as the best value. The price point was above the $300 I spent on our ‘family’ laptop a year ago, but I’m glad I spent the extra $100 (check out some of the private sellers’ prices). Pros: Crystal-clear LED screen, fast computing, great multi-tasking, not too much crap-ware pre-installed, lightweight, and easy-to-use keyboard Cons: Battery life is good, but not great; price point is a bit high if you’re willing to wait for Black Friday or Gold Box deals… which I obviously wasn’t) Overall, this laptop is a good buy in the $500 range, a great value at the $400 level, and–if it ever goes on sale in the $300 to 350 range–don’t miss your chance to buy it!

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