Acer Aspire V5-122P Owners' thread

My only complaint is the abundance of light bleed from the display. Although only really obvious on boot up, it is annoying if not atypical for Acer. Still, Acer has made a gem here. I expect that others will follow. Office university loaded and authenticated without problem. Btw, this unit came with a display port to VGA dongle. My daughters dorm has Ethernet instead of wireless. She'll need an Ethernet adapter. Anybody find one that works?

 

Bronsky
See posts 1, 7, 26, and 35, in this thread in regards to Ethernet adapters. You have two options as pointed out in post 35, USB2/3 or the Lighting Bolt port. I would recommend finding one that uses the Lighting Bolt port as this port was designed with Ethernet in mind.

 

Thanks. I figured that there was some solution for the LB port. I'll take a spin over the Apple Store and try out a TB port/Ethernet adapter to see if they work in the Acer's port. BTW, anybody else have the kind of light bleed I see on my daughter's V5? If so, its no big deal. If its merely that the display is not properly seated, I might make a trip to the MS store and look for one without the bleed. What's the consensus?

 

Mine also has terrible light bleeding on the right side of the screen, and a little on the left side. Like you said, its only most noticeable during the Acer logo startup screen and after that its not a bother. Its only during an all blacked out screen. Once the colors come on, its gone. I was considering sending mine back too but from what I understand this is a common and normal thing on IPS displays. I'll upload some pictures of mine later.

Who else is suffering from this "issue?"

 

My V5-122P-0643 has that light bleed through during start-up on both the right and left sides of the screen. I do not really notice it after the computer has warmed up. The strange thing is that most of the time I do not notice the bleed through. I will pay more attention to this but it does not seem to happen every time. Could this "issue" be related to the fact that this is a touchscreen? As an aside, this is the first computer that I have owned that has had this new "feature."

 

I'm curious to know if anyone has upgraded their 122P with a hybrid drive. I'm all about a full SSD but right now a 500 GB SSD - which is what I think I need - is a little out of reach. Hybrid seem much more affordable but I'm skeptical about the performance gains. Anyone with first hand knowledge of a 122P running a hybrid? Thanks!

 

how is the performance though? anyone run software like photoshop or games on it?

 

I just ordered one of these little guys, should be here Thursday. I intend on swapping out the SSD for an Intel 120GB X25-M I have on hand. I also have a Samsung 830 but I think that may be a little too overpowered for the machine since most of the time will be waiting for the CPU and not the SSD.

In any case this does look like a little gem of a laptop that I struck for $379 on a fluke at Amazon I think. It's the A6 4GB -600 model. I plan on throwing in a 4GB chip though. I can add an 8GB just for fun to see if it works.

The one thing I hope it CAN do is run at 1.4GHz with the latest BIOS and drivers. While I know this will be a dog at gaming newer titles, older games should be great. I plan on running some older titles: Freelancer, C&C Generals Zero Hour, Comanche 4, AoE 3, Independence War 2, an older Tomb Raider game, even Half-Life 2.

I'm actually pretty excited about this laptop.

 

It's a decent little notebook. The display is striking and the best I've seen in an 11.6". Since Acer usually provides a fairly clean bios, there might be oc'ing opportunities. Nice to see Acer waking up.

 

Windows 7 runs surprisingly well on the v5-122p. It felt faster than the factory Acer Windows 8 Installation. By faster I mean that webpages loaded up much quicker and even touch-scrolling responded much smoother. It feels faster and smoother. Then again, I haven't loaded it up much and I added a 7200RPM drive. "Power Saver" mode is more usable.

NOTE: In order to install Windows 7 you must first create a BIOS password in order to disable Secure Boot and then change the BOOT type to Legacy.

After a Windows 7 SP1 Fresh Installation, this is what was missing from Device Manager:


After some chipset and video drivers it was time to check out the System:


And the WEI for the v5-122p-0600 in Windows 7 with an HGST 500GB 7200RPM HDD and OEM 2+2GB RAM (4GB is ok for me):


The ONLY thing that I know of that doesn't work correctly under Windows 7 is the brightness control. For some odd reason there is only HIGH and LOW brightness levels from the LCD backlight, even though the brightness level in the OS changes. Other than that Windows 7 runs flawless on this little beast. Every other Windows 8 driver like the ELAN touchpad is working as it was in Windows 8.

It may be a placebo affect but It also looks like the CPU idle-utilization is LOWER now than what it was with the OEM Windows 8 Installation. I would see CPU usage jumping from 5%-15% even when I wasn't really doing anything. Chippy from UltraBookNews or something like that mentioned a similar thing on YouTube when he was reviewing his v5-122p.

PS-I also did a fresh Windows 8 Install. Trying out dual-boot on this 500GB HDD for kicks.