Hello, my freaky darlings. I’ve been up to my hips in too much to do for the last week or so and haven’t had a ton of time to devote to gaming. I did have to buy a laptop since I’ll be largely out of my house for three – six weeks, so here’s a review of said laptop and what I’ve done on it so far.
Acer Aspire AS5552-7819 Notebook. I bought it from NewEgg, my reliable source, for 389.99. AMD Phenom II Dual-Core N660 3.0GHz, 4GB DDR3, 320GB hard drive, ATI Radeon HD 4250 graphics card, DVD Super Multi drive on board. On board wireless of course. 3 USB ports, two on the right one on the left, one VGA and and HDMI port on the left. This is my first laptop and here are my observations thus far.
It’s heavier than I expected, even though I intentionally picked a 15.6″ screen. Carrying in a big over my shoulder though two parking garages and winding through endless hospital corridors made it seem crazy heavy. It has a heat vent on the upper left corner and that can get pretty danged hot. It comes loaded with a ton of just crap and I’m still uninstalling all that.
That’s about all that I can say that isn’t positive about this notebook. It runs EQ2 an RIft both during full raids, though I have to scale the graphics down to basic. That’s not an issue for me since I often have to do that to fight server lag (HALP AB NEED NEW SERVER). It runs Leauge of Legends decently enough; again I find it easier to turn down the graphics and shadows. My other usual programs, AIM, AOL, various Facebook games, ACT, iTunes (the playback part*), Legends of Norrath, all totally playable. Netflix movies totally fine when they actually have the things I want to see! OpenOffice is perking along fine. It comes loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I am a Win XP girl so that’s been something of a learning curve. There are things I like about it and things I do not like but that is completely a user deal not a laptop issue.
I would recommend it pretty highly especially if you don’t raid or just raid casually but want to be able to game and write and surf the web. I’ve gotten around the heat issue by placing a skinny book under the notebook to lift it off whatever surface I’m using. That seems to have really done the trick. For the very reasonable price I’d say go for this notebook. You’ll have to provide your own bag of course.
iTunes — my beloved, why you hurt me? It plays stuff fine and I was able to figure out how to synch my iTunes libraries to the notebook and my main PC. However it won’t connect to the iTunes store, which I believe to be some weird security conflict in Win 7. Still working on that.
Belkin USB Wired Optical Retractable Travel Mouse. Blah I want my 15 bucks back. This thing is small child sized and the cords tangle horribly. Do not want. Find an optical mouse you like and stick it into your laptop bag.
TekNmotion Yapster Universal Gaming Headset. Holy crap this is a good headset and cheap as free. 12.99 for one of the best headsets I’ve had to date. I’m afraid it may not hold up to heavy use but the sound quality is so good I will definitely get more. Some of the reviews complain about it not fitting well but it hasn’t been an issue for me.