Acer Aspire 1700 Review

This review is, in the end, mostly negative about the new Acer Aspire 1700. The reviewer seems to think there's a lot of nice features such as the amazing screen, but some of the laptops problems are just plain dumb such as an unusable nav pad, silly keyboard config, and horrible battery life and weight.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/71/36076.html

I love the comment about the AC adapter being the size of his shoe, this thing really is large!

 

an interesting review of this behemoth, but apparently keyboards in britain are different from the ones over here, because I haven't a clue what a "full-stop" key is, and while I understand what the @ is, for us it's shift+2 not a dedicated key. There must be some carryover in british parlance from the typewriter days.

 

the "full-stop" key means a sentence "period" punctuation mark to the Yankees in the crowd [ ]

I live in the U.S. but did live in the UK for awhile so am able to translate such jargon!

 

And to think that a guy with a degree in english wouldn't know that *full-stop*
Thanks!

 

Here's a review of my 1705smi Aspire which I have had for about a month now.

First Impressions from the picture in the magazine were impressive, as were the tech specs, and when i went to the showroom to actually see it in the flesh as it were, I was a bit taken aback by the sheer size of the beast...... and the weight of it when i tried to pick it up. The damn thing is a *lot* heavier than my old Tosh Laptop.
This didn't put me off though, as the specs of this lovely machine were what i was after, and as I take it to work every day, it sits on my desk till hometime and isn't carried all over the place all day, it didn't matter.
At the time of buying, i asked for a spare battery to be included in the deal, as I would have liked the option of having a little extra runtime on a plane or boat journey.... to which i was told...."you do realise Sir, that Acer weren't too clever in desiging this with an easily replaceable battery... you have to unscrew the whole of the underside of the laptop to replace it!!"
I could not believe this, but the manual does indeed tell you that you must dismantle the laptop to change the battery. Now theres a sore point that "The Register" review fails to omit.
It is however correct in saying that the 1700 does have a lot of positives, features galore, and espically in this 1705smi model, the geForce FXgo5600 128MB Graphics option, DVD Rewriter, Firewire, USB2 x 4, and the usual gaggle of coms/printer/ps2/video/audio/LAN/TV-out etc.... and 802.11b wireless.
The keyboard is a little fiddly to begin with, but you do get used to it. It IS just bad design that they made the full-stop/period & forward slash & Backward Slash buttons about ¾ size, but oddly enough , NOT the @ key on this model. The cursor keys are also ¾ size which makes gaming tricky, the numeric keypad is fullsize though.
The screen is nothing short of fantastic, and is V V Bright (Adjustable), colour rich, and handles games and dvds just fine without too much blurring at all. GTA Vice city never looked so good in fact !!!
One thing I will say on the subject of games though, is to ditch the supplied Go5600 drivers (44.01)because of a lot of glitches in 3D games and draw errors, and download the latest version you can find, which is harder than it seems, as Nvidia doesn't support the Go chipset directly, but a search for other laptops sporting the 5600 chipset will lead you to newer drivers from HP/Sony to name but 2 ( i'm using 47.12 now)

I could say a lot more here, but to round off, I'd say that it's an incredible machine for the money if you can handle the weight of it. Plenty fast, and then some ( 3.06 GHz Hyper threading ), a screen to die for, and a huge 120GB hard disk that doesn't lag like other laptops ( Ok so its a desptop HDD )

cheers all


Abyzz , Belfast, NI
Acer Aspire 1705smi

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by abyzz

 

Nearly 3 years on and my Aspire is still going strong !!!!

I have a Sony now, but the Acer is still with me, and my wife uses it.

The only thing that went wrong, was that the LCD backlight inverter board failed, but I was able to order a new part from a local dealer and fixed it.
I also upgraded the DVD writer to a faster model, and i *tried* to upgrade the hard disk to a bigger one, but it would not recognise anything larger than 120GB, which it had already.
I also upped the RAM to 1GB.

Still an impressive beast, that is still as fast as a lot of other PC's and has many years left in it yet!

 

@abyzz.

My son has an Acer 1705SMi but the battery died some time ago and he has virtually given up using it .. except when he pops back from uni.

I tend to use it but also need to have the battery working.

Would you be so kind as to let me know what replacement battery you used and how difficult it is/was to actually replace the battery.

And I think it is a terrific machine, although very heavy and certainly not portable but makes my toshiba seem very slow.

Dave.