great for watching Bluray movies

Purchased here (via J&R) great price on a bluray packing 15" laptop. 16:9 screen is great for watching movies. Screen looks great watched Ratattouie (Pixar) DVD and The Bank Job bluray. Both movies looked great. Sound is Dolby Digital and sounds great on headphones. Built in speakers sound terrible. Via even a cheap pair of headphones the sound is superb. I heard sounds on Ratattouie that I never heard before.



Here's some good news: The HDMI port supports both video (duh) and Audio! Yay! When connecting the HDMI to my receiver the ATI video driver popped up a warning that Audio is not supported. But clicking "help" opened a page basically saying that this is a generic message to warn users that a video card prior to Radeon 2xxx series does not support audio over HDMI but anything later (including the one on this laptop the 4200) DOES in fact support Audio. And a quick test (of those two movies) proved that it was Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. The included movie player from Acer sent 1080p and 5.1 sound out the HDMI and it seems that MS Media player did too. So no additional software is needed to output to 5.1 with both BR and DVD. One final note on movie watching: The Acer movie player worked flawlessly but when I tried MS Media Player it stuttered often and was annoying. Figures. So stick with the included (and set as default player) Acer movie player.



Gaming is NOT recommended. I grabbed the first game disc I had lying around that I had both the disc AND the install key (always hard to find both when you need them) and it was Call of Duty World at War. It was awful. At the default 1024x768 it was an unplayable slide show and at the lowest settings (640x480 and every possible feature set to low) it was still an unplayable 5-10 fps. So that was disappointing but not a show stopper as we already have two high-end gaming computers in the house and really what did I expect for under 6 Benjamins?



I purchased this primarily to have a portable Bluray playing laptop and it fits the bill perfectly. As of this writing (2/1/2010) it is the cheapest Bluray playing laptop on Earth (or that I could find anyway and believe me I spent/wasted a lot of time searching!).



I have another 2-year old Acer Aspire also a 15" widescreen that is heavier with a worse keyboard than this model. I really am happy with the fit and finish of this model. The added keypad makes the keyboard sit left-of-center which takes a little getting used to as does the multi-touch touchpad which is sensitive and hitting it accidently with a 2nd finger causes the mouse to jump around. The vertical scrolling feature on the right of the pad isn't very accurate (had the same problem on my older Acer). We use Toshiba laptops at work and their scrolling feature is definitely better.



Some other non-issues: not many stickers. Not much bloatware at all. Comes with MS Works SE which DOES read and write word and excel files (you just can't set those as the default save/open option). Works SE is advertised based but it gives you the option to purchase the non-ad version. MS Office Student is 60 day trial. The 320GB drive is a single partition (yay!).



That's about it. A great deal on a bluray laptop that works great.More detail ...

Five Star Review 99% "Good" but here are the "Bad" points

The 6491 configuration of Acer's AS5740 boasts Intel's new Core i5 processor and a quick review of the spec sheet reveals that this configuration is amazingly "tricked out" for the price. For those wondering the "Gemstone" blue color is very dark almost black.

I'm extremely pleased with the notebook but offer the following for those who may be considering this purchase. Note that I actually ordered a replacement from J&R because of the following concerns but will ultimately be keeping the original.

First you'll need to live with the fact that the speakers are simply no good in the AS5740s. They'll pass at low volume and are OK for general computing i.e. Windows system sounds but for music and movies -- not so good. At increased volumes they vibrate a bit and the different settings available i.e Dolby Surround etc. just change the sound without really improving it. I thought I had a dud machine with bad speakers but the replacement was just as bad and other reviews point to the speakers as one of the few criticisms. If you plan to use this as a mobile media player then you may not be satisfied. Again for general use it's OK.

Second as with many of the newer energy saving hard drives the HD in the AS5740s (in my case a Western Digital Scorpio 500G drive) frequently parks its heads - causing a noticeable click (or tink) that was driving me absolutely crazy. I would describe the sound as kind of like a camera shutter and at first I thought it was a Windows system sound -- perhaps the Internet Explorer "Start Navigation" sound i.e. the click you get when you move to a new web page. I muted all Windows sounds and it was still there so I knew it was mechanical. When the replacement machine made the same sound I researched the issue and found that it was indeed the heads parking -- a common complaint with many different brands of hard drives these days.

It's a power-saving feature that can be modified with any Hard Drive management software. I tried a program called Drive Power Manager (drivepowermanager dot com) and adjusted the settings to high performance 254 and disabled the standby mode and now the HD is quiet as a mouse. In effect you just need to keep the HD working so it doesn't constantly park. And you can always go back to the power-saving settings if you wish or if the sound does not bother you (unlikely).

So bottom line I'm keeping the original machine sending the replacement back to J&R (who were wonderful throughout) and rate the AS5740-6491 with 5 stars notwithstanding its less than impressive speakers. The other features more than make up for that shortcoming.More detail ...

Awesome Computer

This is a great laptop. I read reviews and info about this for more than a month before laying down the cash for it. I've been extremely happy with it. It's thin and sexy. It's light (especially for a 15 inch laptop). It's extremely cool. The performance is good but not amazing. I mostly work with music editing and notation software and this laptop has handled all them fine. I play games online with it and I have yet to find a game that it can't handle (it should be noted I only play games from the browser and have no idea how a real computer game would do but I know since this doesn't have a graphics card it probably wouldn't do well with 3d graphics but I dont really know.) For everyday computing this computer has all the power you need. The 15 inch model is great too. The keyboard is full sized (which was somewhat of an adjustment after using cramped keyboards for so long) and the number pad is extremely helpful (at least to me).



The battery life is why you buy this computer. All day computing is no lie. I used to own a Dell and a Toshiba which got about 3 hours battery life at best and then up to 10 minutes as they got old. It's been hard to break the habit of packing my power adapter when I leave but I've never needed it. I can go to school all day take my computer to class work in the library or cafeteria and never need to worry about running out of juice. If I crank it up to "High Performance" I can get a solid 5 to 6 hours of battery on "Power Saver" I get an easy 8 and a half and if I turn off the WiFi I can get a little more then 10 hours. I've never never never run it down completely during normal use.



Overall a great computer at a great price. Everything you need with an unbelievable battery life. Free yourself from the wall socket and buy this computer!More detail ...