Customer Reviews

Acer AS7540-1317 17.3-Inch Laptop (Blue)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fast, Effective and Efficient buy for Laptop $$$

Overall very pleased with this machine. The larger 17.3" Screen provides ample viewing space for multiple windows. Not to mention that the HD color is impressive upgrade from the traditional LCD screens. The true color registration is very useful for artist and graphic use. The AMD Athlon II x2 processors (2.0GHz) and ATI combination is very effective and runs cool n quiet for size. The dedicated ATI Radeon graphics card works great and seamlessly for large video demos and graphics needs. It supports Adobe Photo shop quickly & seamlessly. The track pad can be a bit hypersensitive but affords the abbility to go back or toggle easily between windows once you have practice. You get the nice touch of disabling it for typing mode or curious little fingers.

So I have had my machine for a little over week now. It is my second Acer. My first one has been running for 5yrs (still going) but no longer had the dedicated memory capacity for my graphics needs.

Ok so its been a while since i had a new laptop but i think this one does what i need and it does it very well. the speeds are snappy, the longest waiting time i had was for windows to remove all the bundle software that came with the laptop (seriously, who uses McAfee still?).

Windows gave it an overall score of 4.0 and the reason for that is because the ATI Radeon in this laptop is designed more so for viewing video (HD at that) which displays great on its crisp LED screen. if you find yourself being a media hog i would recommend at least a network/external drive or upgrading the one with it, it comes with 320 (good for moderate users) but media people on a budget will find that they can fill that up in a moment. I have yet to test it with games but according to several reviews they say that the video card should be able to play games like modern warfare 2, on its lowest settings.

The Multi-touch track pad is something i have yet to find a true use for, sure you can start in the corner and spiral around like an ipod to scroll down or up.. but why? there is a built in scrolling bar. Ok so you can pinch in and push out to zoom in and out... most people already know that the scroll bar does the same thing... seems more like a gimmick then something useful even the photo rotating command feels awkward to perform.

all in all its a good laptop for the price, not for gaming or long flights (average battery time i get is about 2.5-3 hours), but it fits that niche for people who need to have a big screen for either media or for viewing a lot of documents.

You can't beat this laptop for value for dollar. Not only is it beautiful to look at, it does everything you would need a laptop to do with ease. Having owned it for a month now, I can say it considerably exceeds my expectations. I use it for both work (network operations for a telecom) as well as personal use. It runs basically silent, even with the fan on high under heavy load you will not have any complaints about noise. I've been running a distributed computing application on it which keeps both processors working full tilt all the time and this laptop takes it in stride and never even gets warm enough to be noticeable. If you're looking for a gaming rig, this is not it. If you want a good all-around workhorse with a stunning monitor and a great design/layout that will never disappoint you, this is the laptop for you. Not to mention you will be hard pressed to find another laptop with this set of specs for under $600.

My husband and I purchased this 17.3" acer laptop thru a store and we are very pleased with the purchase. We like this feature of the amd dual core athlon which is equal to the i3. We have a acer which is 5 years old and have really no problems with it but we wanted something faster and it also had win7 on it. This new laptop came with better features with it. I am now in the market for a better digital camera since we love to take pictures. We have been looking at the sony panaramic 14megapixel hd digial camera and we will probably be getting that one by early xmas. The camera we have now will be a backup. Thanks again acer for making us a satisfied customer. You not only bring out great technology but great products. You won our vote and support once again.

There are certainly comparable laptops near this price range, but I found this one to be a decent value. It's peppy. It has a lot of RAM. It's got Windows 7 pre-loaded and it's not bogged down with too much crapware. The screen is very nice and super bright (with brightness controls linked to Fn+Left/Right arrow keys). There are enough USB ports (3 or 4) and even an HDMI port for using the laptop as a media player on your TV. So for me, this meets my needs of having a laptop in the living room for casual internet browsing and also having something powerful enough to play hi-def video or run powerful software like Photoshop or Visual Studio.

My biggest issue with this laptop is the touchpad -- which is multitouch by the way. The touchpad itself is fine. It's large, supports multitouch, and the included software has a lot of configuration options available that I won't go into here. But it's the buttons and the placement of the pad that are awkward. And when I say "buttons" I mean it's actually a single button where the left side is left click and the right side is right click. The single button spans the width of the wide touchpad so it basically requires 2 hands to use because you can't bring your thumb over far enough to right-click. It's really a horrible design. Someone should be slapped. The touch pad is also over on the left side of the laptop so it's almost like it was designed for a lefty. I actually find that it's more usable with my left hand, but I'm a righty so it's awkward. Anyway, my wife says that had we had a chance to experience the awful touchpad in a store instead of buying the laptop blind on Amazon that we would definitely not have gotten it. Personally I don't think it's that bad because the laptop is fine and I can hook up an external mouse with one of the little nano receivers.

As far as the multitouch, it's super gimmicky. I'd prefer keyboard shortcuts to awkward pinching and swiping gestures any day. Not all software supports it anyway so it's not even like you start to rely on it. It's more like: "Oh wow, this program supports the swipe gesture. Yay... But, oh look how much easier it is just to use the arrow keys." Multitouch makes sense on small gadgets like smart phones, but when I have a full keyboard, why bother?

Speaking of keyboard... this one is a full keyboard as in having a number pad. So that's nice. The Home, End, PgUp and PgDown keys are in an unusual position, but you get used to it. The key presses are fine. Typical laptop keys I would say.

As I said with the brightness controls, the volume control is also linked to the Fn+Arrow Up/Down keys. I'm fine with that, but it should be noted that other laptops have a much more elegant means of controlling the volume. HP for example has a little touch-slider on all of their laptops that I like a lot.

Other things I like are no flip-up latch. You just open and close the laptop without having to unlock -- though this seems to be standard these days. The WiFi adapter supports all the latest security protocols. And there's a decent video card for some light gaming. All in all, I'm pleased. I just wish the touchpad was designed better.

As the headline states, my rating is about the nonexistant customer service....BE WARNED!! I purchased this exact computer yesterday at Walmart for 498.00. When I followed the instructions for starting the computer up for the first time, it must have been programmed to download ebay worldwide, google taskbar, McAfee and Norton. I HATE, HATE, HATE Norton and have no use for the ebay worldwide programs and tried to uninstall them. I tried several times and could not do it. Google and McAfee uninstalled with no problem. Since there were only phone numbers for Latin America in the box (that should have clued me in) I located an Acer phone number online. Gee, guess what? According to the "support" people there, you have to pay an additional 139.00 for them to tell you how to remove the programs. They say the warranty doesn't cover software. You see, even if you buy the computer today, like I did, they won't help you with any of the software programs THEY install into the computer at the factory. I also found that this computer likes to shut itself off when not plugged in even if the battery power is at 80%. VERY annoying if you get up to grab a cup of coffee and find yourself having to log back on. I really wish they would go back to the days of the customer just installing the programs ourselves.

If anyone has any idea as to how to remove this crummy ebay program and Norton (I know it's a security program, but with my Dell laptop, it was more like a virus and I prefer a different brand of security) I would appreciate the information.

Freezes up way too often. Cursor jumps all over the screen. Takes forever to get anything done. Just not a very good laptop.

The cons outweight the pros on this laptop for me and if it hadn't been too much trouble I'd have returned it.

PROs:
1) wide screen
2) light weight
3) relatively cheap

CONS:
1) keyboard has flat keys, very tightly spaced, so it's very easy to make typos. I'm a good touch typist
and when I first got this laptop I resorted to 2-finger typing. I almost returned it for this alone.
2) sometimes when I'm composing email everything I've written is suddenly erased. I think it has to do
with the heels of both palms touching the case at the same time, the way you would normally rest your
wrists. I've resorted to composing email in Word then cut and pasting it into the mail window.
3) it sometimes zooms when I don't want it to, I think also when the heels both palms touch the case.
4) the screen won't fold back flat; my other laptops (Dell, Gateway) have done this making it easy to set
up a larger monitor and just slide the laptop under so just the keyboard is exposed.

Note: none of these problems have occured with any other laptop I've used.

I bought this for a friend because he had a computer failure. He is enjoying it. I can't review the features since I have not used it.