Acer Aspire 5740G Owners Lounge

[downloads]

That's interesting but doesn't make too much sense.
First of all Windows does not control the way battery is being charged- battery is going to charge also if you leave the computer with BIOS menu enabled and is going charge in the same way it would in Windows.
Smart batteries have a chip that controls the process and it's the battery that informs Windows about its power state not the other way around, so the theory that Windows didn't "inform" the battery that it's already fully charged so the battery kept charging and cooked itself is bollocks.
It's pretty similar to the theory that Win 7 destroys batteries because it reports high wear level soon after the upgrade from Windows Vista- people don't understand something and confuse the reason with the result.

I'm following three threads (this one included) about this laptop in three countries on two continents with total number of posts is in these exceeding 1500 and it's the second time I see a battery related problem. The first one was battery dead due to pre-1.16 BIOS critical-level problems.
What's more I've drained my battery completely i.e. for the battery eater test and for my real-life test and charged it fully again. I even checked before posting this that battery charges fine to a 100% level (although I started from 90%- still according to that post it would/should stop at 97%)
Anyway- if one gentleman has a problem with three laptops and no one else even heard about it it's hardly something to keep in mind (that's unless the story evolves )

[jackandjill]

Hey
Nice to see a prompt reply.

I want to buy a laptop(my first one).
i am confused between the two models:
1) The Acer with 5650 graphics card(same as above) 45500 Rs
2) Sony E series with same card( i know it is underclocked) but with full HD
50000Rs
(the diff in processors i think is not much)

I dont know how much difference does full HD makes, on the games like COD 6 MF2 and Dirt 2. I am from Faridabad, India and I went to the croma store and saw the two above laptops.

The sony one definitely has a crisp, vibrant, better color contrast screen as i could judge from the sample HD wildlife video put on both.

So the question is:
For gaming and lot of text reading( I read all my books on the computer in pdf format) which screen is better and how much is the difference.

Is it worth the price difference.

Is it possible to upgrade the LCD screen later on when i have sufficient money.

[downloads]

Acer is definitely better for gaming because Sony has much higher resolution paired with an underclocked card (you probably will not be able to OC it much as I guess the card is underclocked due to small cooling system and means probably that the card is also undervolted so it won't be stable OCed)
As an example- Vaio with underclocked HD5650 scored an average of 22fps in Dirt 2 in 1366x768 with 2xAA (source). It's unplayable already- and imagine what would happen in 1920x1080. With Aspire 5740G you are pretty much guaranteed to achieve 650/900 clocks compared to 450/800 (Sony default)- that's almost 50% more power from Acer which would mean smooth framerates in Dirt 2 in 1366x768.
Full HD (Sony) has twice the pixel count of HD ready (Acer) so it requires a lot more juice from the GPU.

As for reading- Acer should be fine- I read a lot of e-books too and I don't complain.

[jackandjill]

Acer is definitely better for gaming because Sony has much higher resolution paired with an underclocked card (you probably will not be able to OC it much as I guess the card is underclocked due to small cooling system and means probably that the card is also undervolted so it won't be stable OCed)
As an example- Vaio with underclocked HD5650 scored an average of 22fps in Dirt 2 in 1366x768 with 2xAA It's unplayable already- and imagine what would happen in 1920x1080. With Aspire 5740G you are pretty much guaranteed to achieve 650/900 clocks compared to 450/800 (Sony default)- that's almost 50% more power from Acer which would mean smooth framerates in Dirt 2 in 1366x768.
Full HD (Sony) has twice the pixel count of HD ready (Acer) so it requires a lot more juice from the GPU.

As for reading- Acer should be fine- I read a lot of e-books too and I don't complain.

Thanks bro.
Will buy the Acer with 5650 graphics finally, tommorow.
Will come back with the reports.
one final question:
Do i need to make the backup(Recovery) Win 7 DVDs at the time of install of windows or later. And which DVD(capacity-Dual or single layer) should I use ideally for that?
Thanks in advance

[downloads]

You probably can do it later but I'd recommend doing it right away before you forget or have the time to cause some trouble
Backup requires 3 single layer DVDs + additional one for drivers and apps so there's no point in using DVD DL as Win backup won't fit on one DL anyway.

[tricksta175]

if i had normal brightness and was mainly surfing, could you give me an estimated battery life?

[downloads]

Almost three hours according to a review by notebookcheck (they tested HD5740G equipped version but surfing is not GPU intensive and both cards are 40nm and have similar TDP so should be almost the same at idle)

[tricksta175]

so hard to choose...im deciding between this acer laptop and the asus n61jq, any opinions?

[downloads]

It's not the same price-range where I live- Asus is one third more expensive.
Asus has the advantage of e-SATA and USB 3.0 (1 port though). HD5650 and HD5730 the same core, different frequencies- you can OC both but in terms of framerates n61jq is not going to justify the price difference. Couldn't find any Crisys benchmarks in n61jq owners lounge but OCed HD5730 scored 33fps in Crysis in the same settings that my OCed 5650 scored 30fps.
Both benchamrks with the same CPU (Core i5) but Core i7 doesn't impress me- 45W TDP and not very useful for gaming (unless possibly for GTA IV)

I don't mean to say that n61jq is not gonna be faster than Aspire 5740G but as I said -the difference in speed is not going to justify the difference in price- it's the same league. I actually considered n61 series but decided against it- with basically the same GPU both are going to play the same games and not-be-able to play the same games. Plus I don't like the 45W CPU compared to 35W Core i5 (35W includes Intel HD Video that's disabled so in practise it's even less)

[tricksta175]

do you think there's also a large gap in battery life between the asus and acer?
oh, for me, they are the same price, i have an offer of $1500 for both (it's expensive in australia)