Walmart Acer 348.00

1g goes on sale Friday at Walmart...if ya havent seen the commercial already. Good xmas present for a kid or anyboyd on a limited budget.

 

With 512MB of memory and Vista, my guess is it will be slow.

 

Just picked one up for my girl (internet, word docs, and music) and its great for the price. The 1.73 ghz single core feels zippy after removing the 30+ (not exaggerating) bloatware programs, even though im used to dual core goodness by now

Oh and ZaZ, it comes with 1gig ram! Pretty good I think

 

I just had a Compaq with the equivalent Sempron. It had 1GB of memory and was slow. That's interesting about the bloatware. Acer used to be the one budget notebook line that didn't infest their machines with it.

 

I guess that beats the EEE (except for portability).

 

Got the 5100 for the same price. Apparently, a pricing error. Has 1gb, 120gb, ATI x1300, Vista Premium, and AMD x2 TR-53. Good deal?

 

Of course that's a great deal.

 

The $348 Wal-Mart Aspire 5315-2153 has 1 gig RAM and an 80 gig HD- with almost 10 gig used for the PQSERVICE partition.

It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and a load of shovelware pre-installed. Since the drive is a DVD-ROM/CD-RW you can only burn eRecovery CDs, 12 of them, 9 for the factory reinstall (puts it back exactly to out of box setup) and 3 for a pack that re-installs the factory utilities, drivers and software package.

I assume those discs are for people who install their own Vista and want a quick way to put all the drivers etc back. Unfortunately that also infests the thing with Norton Slow Down Your PC (aka "Internet Security").

Here is where you can find the latest Vista version of Launch Manager and a non-corrupted ZIP of the updated eNet Manager that doesn't constantly tell you the network is disconnected/connected.

ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/aspire_5315

The BIOS version on the Wal-Mart special (on the two I got) is 1.17. At that FTP (look under Vista) are 1.16, 1.18 and 1.19. The 1.19 may be of interest as it's changelog mentions this:

I may try that to see if it cures the touchpad of its random non-responsiveness. A couple of times the pad has just quit completely and I had to reboot to make it work again.

You won't find the BIOS updates or the Vista Launch Manager update through the normal Acer website support. The eNet Manager update available there is corrupted. (Bad CRC in the installer in the ZIP.) I also found it through the Australian Acer site but they link to the same corrupted file.

One thing you'll definately want to do is go right to Mouse on the control panel and TURN OFF TAPPING. This touchpad is hyper sensitive to the slightest intermittent touch of a palm while typing and interpreting it as a tap or doubletap, and thus moving your cursor so you end up typing back in the middle of your sentence or highlighting and deleting most of what you just wrote. (I'd much rather have a Toshiba/IBM style Accupointer or better yet- bring back the trackball!) Hooray for the Microsoft Trackball Optical 1.0! Big but ergonomic and perfectly at home resting on my thigh or arm of a comfy chair.