Double posting cause I need to decide whether or not to buy the Acer before Wednesday (when it still goes for $700 before tax).
I need specs-price reviews, hopefully some anecdotal experience, long term perspectives and what-not.
Also, if you can, refresh my mind what kinds of things I should be looking (out) for in a laptop. Such as:
- From the looks of it, I can easily upgrade the RAM to 8 Gb 1333 MHz and the hard drive to SSD when needs be, which are fine specs by my standard.
- I like the USB 3.0 port just so I won't be outdated in a year or two.
- I don't need a BlueRay player/writer, ever.
- I do expect a strong Wifi antenna (don't even know if this thing varies from machine to machine, my Google G2 can't catch wifi signals where my dad's iPhone4 can).
- I don't care about the speakers. I don't care about the keyboard's vulnerability or the touchpad since I most likely will use a set of wireless keyboard/mouse with it. I don't care about battery life since it almost always will be plugged in.
- I DO care about heating issues. Would a cooling pad help? (Those kinda things smell like gimmicks to me, I'm not really convinced that they actually work.)
Would it be a legitimate concern if I weren't doing any heavy gaming? The upside about not having a video card is not having to worry about it steaming up your laptop, is it not? I remember most of my desktop video cards running constantly at 80+ centigrades, which was intimidating.
What other stuff breaks down often in a laptop? Which ones usually get warranted? Which don't?
What if I were to exchange the i7 for a graphics card? Is it a big performance gap between an i7 (4 cores 8 threads) @ 2.0 GHz and an i5 (2 cores 4 threads) @ 2.66 GHz?
UPDATING TO PUT THIS BABY INTO PICTURE.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6834215004
$150 (or $80 difference if my state doesn't charge me tax for a Newegg purchase) for a video card? Hmmmm....
I need specs-price reviews, hopefully some anecdotal experience, long term perspectives and what-not.
Also, if you can, refresh my mind what kinds of things I should be looking (out) for in a laptop. Such as:
- From the looks of it, I can easily upgrade the RAM to 8 Gb 1333 MHz and the hard drive to SSD when needs be, which are fine specs by my standard.
- I like the USB 3.0 port just so I won't be outdated in a year or two.
- I don't need a BlueRay player/writer, ever.
- I do expect a strong Wifi antenna (don't even know if this thing varies from machine to machine, my Google G2 can't catch wifi signals where my dad's iPhone4 can).
- I don't care about the speakers. I don't care about the keyboard's vulnerability or the touchpad since I most likely will use a set of wireless keyboard/mouse with it. I don't care about battery life since it almost always will be plugged in.
- I DO care about heating issues. Would a cooling pad help? (Those kinda things smell like gimmicks to me, I'm not really convinced that they actually work.)
Would it be a legitimate concern if I weren't doing any heavy gaming? The upside about not having a video card is not having to worry about it steaming up your laptop, is it not? I remember most of my desktop video cards running constantly at 80+ centigrades, which was intimidating.
What other stuff breaks down often in a laptop? Which ones usually get warranted? Which don't?
What if I were to exchange the i7 for a graphics card? Is it a big performance gap between an i7 (4 cores 8 threads) @ 2.0 GHz and an i5 (2 cores 4 threads) @ 2.66 GHz?
UPDATING TO PUT THIS BABY INTO PICTURE.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6834215004
$150 (or $80 difference if my state doesn't charge me tax for a Newegg purchase) for a video card? Hmmmm....