Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)
admin | Mar 01, 2011 | Comments 3
Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)
- The Acer Aspire AS5742Z Notebook offers powerful performance, the latest connectivity technology and rich media features for a quick, responsive PC experience.
- Delight in cinematic brilliance on the 15.6″ HD CineCrystal widescreen LCD Show
- With the potential of an Intel Pentium Dual-Core processor you can keep pace with daily tasks such as email, Internet, homework, and managing household budgets.
- Windows 7 Home Premium makes the things you do every day simpler and with Office Starter 2010, experience new ways to deliver your preeminent work!
- Always be connected to your friends, email and favorite websites with 802.11b/g/n WiFi CERTIFIED wireless connectivity and Gigabit Ethernet LAN.
Acer AS5742Z-4685 Notebook comes with these eyeglasses: Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor P6100, Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit), 15.6″ HD Widescreen CineCrystal LCD Show, Mobile Intel HM55 Express Chipset, 4096MB DDR3 1066MHz Memory, Intel HD Graphics, 320GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive, 8X DVD-SuperMulti Double-Layer Drive, Built-in 1.3MP HD Webcam (1280 x 1024), 2-in-1 Digital Media Card Reader, High-Definition Audio Support, 802.11b/g/n WiFi CERTIFIED, 3 – USB 2.0 Ports, HDMI Port, Multi-gesture To
List Price: $ 549.99
Price: $ 469.90
Popularity: 1% [?]
Filed Under: Budgeting
Very impressive laptop for the price!,
I’m a to some extent advanced computer user and had been looking at laptops for a while before buying the Acer AS5742Z-4685. I dug into all of the eyeglasses of about 6 different models and zeroed in on this one as the preeminent value. The price point was above the $300 I spent on our ‘family tree’ laptop a year ago, but I’m glad I spent the extra $100 (check out some of the confidential sellers’ prices).
Pros: Crystal-clear LED screen, quick computing, fantastic multi-tasking, not too much crap-ware pre-installed, lightweight, and simple-to-use keyboard
Cons: Battery life is excellent, but not fantastic; 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 excellent buy in the $500 range, a fantastic 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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|Quick CPU + Gorgeous Show + Low Price,
This is an incredible 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 fantastic budget processor. This beats down the akin price athlon II mobile processors and seems to be ahead of the ancient 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 fantastic feel and the way it is designed, you really cant make food or other small objects caught under them. This laptop does have 3 usb, 1 on the left and 2 on the aptly.
Highly recommended!
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|Brilliant Laptop, fantastic price,
Bought this laptop for about $450, emancipated expedited shipping from Warehouse Sur+ (Amazon seller). Indoors late due to FedEx, not the fault of Amazon, Warehouse Sur+ or Acer, of course. It was double boxed for shipping, indoors in brilliant shape up.
Brilliant end which makes smudges hard to see. Screen is nice and lofty, crystal clear. We have 4 Acer monitors and all work very well. Not a single issue with them and two are several years ancient, so we were pretty sure Acer would make a excellent 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 sign on the bottom of the laptop, so if you make 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 Prerequisites, emancipated 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 simple to find at the Acer web site (make 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 record card drivers. The Acer website for the AS5742Z lists drivers for both AMD record 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 record driver, which makes life a lot simpler.
If you choose 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 aptly side, one on the left. We place 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 rather a normal mouse. We place in a USB mouse made by Roswell (a cheapo one for $4) and it worked aptly away. The 4GB of RAM were completely accessible, thankfulness 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 make 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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