Blu-Ray drive or burner upgrade?

[MuteMath]

So I have an Acer Aspire 5720z that I want to dedicate as a media center.

Does this model allow for a blu-ray drive or burner upgrade?

[ajbutch123]

yeah, just make sure to find out what kind of drive you are dealing with. There are two kinds: mini sata, or the older ide connector. (I can't remember the technical name for it) You are most likely dealing with the older ide interface. Then after you order the drive, all you need to do is unscrew the one screw that is holding in the drive and pop it out. Then swap the faceplate and bracket that the screw goes through to hold the drive in and pop the new one in.

[ZaZ]

According to the specs on Acer's web site, the 5720z comes with the T2310 or T2330 CPUs and X3100 GPU. The X3100 can't help offload video decoding and the CPUs offer in the 5720z probably aren't fast enough to allow for smooth playback. I had a R60 with the T7400 and X1400, which also can't offload video decoding, and the playback was choppy at best. The CPU ran at 100% nearly all the time. It worked better in XP than Vista, but neither worked well. Interestingly, if I ripped and recoded the Blu-ray to play in Media Player Classic, it worked fine. The CPU ran between 30-40% of capacity during playback.

[MuteMath]

Yeah I had totally forgotten about the video lag. I have the T2310 dual core cpu. I had recently decoded one my blu rays to 720p and 1080p. My inspiron perfectly handled the 1080p rip but my aspire just couldn't keep up (720p is good btw). I'm not going to even bother upgrading to a BR drive.

I wanted to pull out the mobo and enclose it in a custom aluminum box, add a 64GB ssd, blu-ray drive, new ram, and Win 7. I'll probably just sell this laptop then. Thanks guys!