I just picked up an Acer Extensa EX5620-4025 laptop for $399.99 over at Newegg, regularly $499.99 (on-sale currently for $449.99, but with a promo code it gets it down to $399.99).
It really is a fantastic deal considering the specs:
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium
CPU: Intel Pentium dual-core T2370(1.73GHz)
Screen: 15.4″ WXGA
RAM: 1GB DDR2
Hard Disk: 120GB
Optical Drive: DVD Super Multi
Graphics Card: Intel GMA X3100
And for an extra $30 I ordered another GB of RAM for it. I’ve purchased a few of these in the past for clients and they’ve gotten great reviews. Even in the stock configuration I was impressed at the speed it runs Windows Vista (nothing amazing mind you, but still not bad).
Acer also provides XP drivers for the Extensa series of laptops, which is a nice bonus.
The promo code for the extra $50 off is: EMCAGBKAH but it only works if you’re subscribed to Newegg’s newsletter.
Posted in
Aaron Nelsen,
Acer at June 21st, 2008.
1 Comment.
I’ve often wondered just how bad Vista really is on system performance, so recently when I purchased a couple of Acer laptops I decided to install XP on one and leave Vista on the other for a few tests. Basically I’m just running Geekbench and a battery life test, nothing crazy.
For the battery test, I merely pointed the browser to a URL set to auto refresh every 30 seconds and disabled all power saving features.
Both computers are the follwing:
Model: Acer Aspire 4715Z
Processor: 1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core
RAM: 2GB RAM
[ Vista ]
First, I ran Geekbench. The system scored a moderate 1911, but of course the system shipped with a bunch of bloatware, so in the interest of fairness I removed all the pre-installed software and ran Geekbench again, it then scored 1922.
The battery life gave out after 1 hour and 45 minutes of doing nothing but browsing the internet, that’s pretty sad.
[ XP ]
Running Geekbench on XP with no drivers installed, resulted in a score of 1939, only slightly higher than the Vista machine.
After installing all the drivers and re-running Geekbench I ended up with a much more statisfying score of 2168. Not as large of a difference as I expected, but still a noticeable improvement.
The battery life saw a huge jump though, ending with 3 hours and 14 minutes while browsing the internet.
Let’s say you just picked up that sweet Acer Aspire AS4715-4053 notebook for $499.99 at Newegg, but it’s not living up to your expectations due to Windows Vista. Good news! It’s a little known fact that Acer still provides XP compatible drivers for most of their machines, not all but most. So if you happen to be looking for Acer drivers, try their European support site.
I checked and they do offer XP drivers for the Aspire AS47150-4953.
[ Drivers and Utilities (Acer EU) ]