Acer Extensa 5620z opinions please

Berberis

Hi I'm still trying to source a laptop for my daughter who is starting college next week.

I Tesco's today and they had an Acer extensa 5620z for €539 and this also included a bundle which had a bag, norton antivirus, printer, mouse cable and usb stick.

Would this be a good computer for the price. and would it do a student studing for teaching.

Alanstrainor

Do you have any particular budget in your head? It's hard to know what the spec's of the above machine as they will vary. But anyway, i suppose the main question you have to ask yourself is whether this machine will be lugged into college every or whether it will be sitting on a desk most of it's life. Much lighter/smaller machines can be picked for similar money these days, and with equally good specs. Dell's vostro line of notebooks have a 1310 model with a 13" screen, and good spec for the cash. Here's a link to a page with various specs of the 1310 model, Vostro 1310
The prices are marked ex.VAT on that page, but anyone can buy them, not just businesses.

Berberis

Alanstrainor wrote: »

Do you have any particular budget in your head? It's hard to know what the spec's of the above machine as they will vary. But anyway, i suppose the main question you have to ask yourself is whether this machine will be lugged into college every or whether it will be sitting on a desk most of it's life. Much lighter/smaller machines can be picked for similar money these days, and with equally good specs. Dell's vostro line of notebooks have a 1310 model with a 13" screen, and good spec for the cash. Here's a link to a page with various specs of the 1310 model, Vostro 1310
The prices are marked ex.VAT on that page, but anyone can buy them, not just businesses.

To be honest €500 was my max, but with the ani virus and bundle with it, I would be able to go up to the €550.

I'm not too sure if she will be bringing it into college everyday, I would assume thatt for the first year she will probally use it in the evening time more than daily in college.

I,m not very au fait with spec's but did notice that the ram was 2gb. But I have been googling it this evening and most websites are displaying it as 1gb but can be be up graded to 2gb. I suppose I should go back tomorro and check all the spec's again as I would much prefare to get her one that will not need any adjusments to it initially.

thanks for the link to the vostro I will look it up now

dowtchaboy

If you haven't bought by now - I noticed Acer Extensa 5230's in Tesco (Waterford) tonight without a price tag - when I asked I found it was €299 - that's a pretty good price for a 15.1 inch screen, dual layer burner etc. Has Vista, 2.2G Celeron, 1g ram, 160g drive (no webcam I THINK, and battery life would be not as long as smaller netbooks),

Personally I would be inclined to buy a fairly basic but solid machine for her to begin with. Unless she plays high-speed games she really is not going to need high processor speed or fancy graphics. Storage space for photos and music will be much more important, and a decent keyboard action if she is going to type a lot. (storage space for College work is not so demanding - no amount of text and pdf files are going to approach even 10% of what she will have on there for music!)

It won't be long before she has some definite ideas of her own as to what she machine wants next!