Help me choose an 17 or 18 inch HD laptop.

Avoriaz

Avoriaz wrote: »

I have decided to go with the 8935 as I have found it for £650 here, a lot cheaper than Acer Direct at £779, unless I am missing something.

http://www.simplyacer.com/Acer_Aspire_8935G_625128.html

Update: (in the remote hope that someone might be interested )

I went for the 8935 Vista laptop from Simplyacer and it arrived on Wednesday. Very nice it is too. I am more than satisfied with it.

I paid the £39 extra for Windows7.

After checking it out and making sure everything is working I removed the 500gb Vista disk, replaced it with an almost new 320gb disk I have been using for backups and loaded Windows 7 onto that disk. All went ok so I am going to leave that disk in and use the 500gb disk for backups.

There is actually a slot for a second disk but I have decided to keep the 500gb disk in an external caddy. I will load that with all my music videos.

90% of the time I am just using the laptop for internet, WP, running my business etc and it seems daft to have two disks powered up all the time generating heat and wear and tear. It makes more sense to keep it outside and plug in a USB cable whenever I want to play videos.

Thanks to everyone for their comments and advice.

Avoriaz

elvch01 wrote: »

I have an Acer 8930G and am very happy with it. Its a big beastie, but I don't move it around too much

It is a big heavy beast isn't it.

Which of course means that Mrs A can't use it so easily so I get more time on it.

Lil306

Avoriaz wrote: »

Update: (in the remote hope that someone might be interested )

Just noticed this post,

The laptop drives themselves won't generate as much heat as you'd think, but keeping it inside the drive would be good anyway as you can take it where you want now

Hope the laptops doing well for you

Did you find out about the "upgrade to Windows 7" - was it just an additional charge for the newer O/S ?

Avoriaz

Lil306 wrote: »

...The laptop drives themselves won't generate as much heat as you'd think, but keeping it inside the drive would be good anyway as you can take it where you want now....

That is true. They run quite cool in my external caddys. It was the wear and tear factor that more concerned me. My laptop is on most of the day and evening and it seems daft to have the second, rarely used, disk powered up all the time. I am going to put the videos I watch most often on the laptop internal drive and keep the ones I watch less often on the external drive.

I may swap the disks around next time I do a reinstall and balance out the usage over time.

Avoriaz

Lil306 wrote: »

..Did you find out about the "upgrade to Windows 7" - was it just an additional charge for the newer O/S ?

It is a full version of Windows7 for an extra £39. It isn't an upgrade version that requires proof of a Vista license.

SimplyAcer bought several hundred of this discontinued model from Acer just before 7 was released so they all came with Vista.

They did a deal with Acer to offer 7 at a lowish price to anyone buying the Vista laptop.

I did have one problem. The laptop is supplied without a Vista CD as users are instructed to create a recovery CD from the hidden recovery partition. I could not get this to work.

Rather than waste my time struggling I just removed the supplied 500gb disk, fitted a blank 320gb disk, installed 7 on that and, once I was happy that 7 was working fine I erased everything, including Vista, on the supplied 500gb drive.

That does mean I can't go back to Vista but I can't envisage ever wanting to do that.

I'm very happy so far with 7.