Acer Aspire 5040 laptop:
- AMD turion 64 (ML-34, 1.8GHz 1MB L2 Cache) cpu
- 1GB of memory
- 120GB of hard drive
- 15.4" WXGA CrystalBrite LCD display
- DVD-Super Multi Double Layer (DVD+R and DVD+RW)
- Wireless Ethernet adapter (802.11b/g)
- 56K Fax/Modem. 10/100/1000Mbps LAN
- ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M 3D graphics up to 128MB
- Windows XP Media Center Edition
Pros:
- Light weight
- Bargain price
- Quiet fan
- Good battery life
- Buggy drivers - need to hunt around for the correct ones
- Not bundled with much useful software
- Mediocre sound quality
At first, out of the box, the laptop is light, weighing 3.07 kg (about 6.7 pounds). However, it comes with absolutely no CDs, not even a data recovery cd. When the laptop is first powered, there is lengthy setup time, of about 30 minutes, for Windows and all the other Acer software. One of the nice features of the laptop is the middle mouse button on the touchpad that can be used as a scroll wheel. However, every time that button was pressed, the mouse driver (Synaptics Pointing Device) would crash. Downloading an update from the Acer website didn't fix the problem. I had to download the latest version of the driver, v8.3.4, from www.synaptics.com for the problem to disappear. Once this problem fixed, I noticed that the Wireless Network Connection in Windows XP wouldn't find my network connection after the laptop was in standby mode. I tried downloading the latest Broadcom drivers and it didn't help. It is not a problem with Windows XP as I never saw this problem with any of my wireless devices before, it must be a problem with either the Acer laptop of the Broadcom drivers.
The laptop is bundled with minimal software, it does however include a 60 day subscription to Norton Antivirus. The battery life is about 3 hours with light usage, under heavy usage it is a bit under 2 hours since the cooling fan will be on more often and the CPU will be running at higher speed. The speaker are not loud enough to make video streaming a pleasant experience.
If you can live with some of the issues with this laptop, like needing to restart windows when the wireless network connection cannot be found, for 850$ Canadian, this laptop is a bargain.
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