Review : Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)

Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)

Review By : Trellium

Bought this laptop for about $ 450, free express shipping warehouse Sur + (Amazon seller). Arrived late due to FedEx, not the fault of the Amazon, Sur Gallery + or Acer, of course. It was double boxed for shipment, arrived in excellent condition.

Excellent surface, makes spots barely visible. The screen is nice and large, crystal clear. We have 4 Acer monitors and all work very well. No problem with them and two are a couple of years old, so we were pretty sure that Acer would be a good laptop, and make.

The laptop comes with Windows Home Premium 7, but not DVDs for him so you can not just reinstall. The key code on a sticker on the bottom of the laptop, so if you have an OEM Windows 7 DVD the vital work to reinstall Windows to seventh It also comes with some crap lets, but you might be interested in McAfee Anti-Virus (we were not we use Microsoft’s Security Essentials, a free download from MS with an authenticated Windows system).

We formatted the hard drive into multiple partitions and install Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (we use BitLocker drive data encryption for data on the laptop and USB drives). Formatting and reinstalling worked fine (and lets not crap!). Since there is no disk in the system, it was a lot of missing drivers (the network card, wireless device, various Intel driver, camera, etc.). All were easily found on the Acer website (to get a different computer if you have to download).

Once we have the network driver, we can immediately see the local network computers and printers, and internet. Once it is found, we went to Microsoft updates and to update that most of the other drivers, including finding the driver for your graphics card appeared. The Acer website lists the AS5742Z driver for the AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, although you probably do not want or need both, and they are large files. The Microsoft Update Web site to detect and install the drivers for video that make life a lot easier.

If you decide to install Windows XP (we have tried to research only if it works) run fine, although we had in the BIOS at startup and change the SATA setting to IDE. The standard XP crashes during installation. This is a snap because Windows 7 is so much better anyway. If you use the normal 32-bit XP, not all of the 4 GB of RAM, you need 64-bit operating systems and thus offers the Acer Windows 7 64-bit version.

The laptop has 3 USB ports, two on the right, on the left. We USB drives in the thumbnail view of all tests and had no problems. We tried the wireless network, it was fine. We also have our 10/100/1000 wired network, the laptop and transfer a large file at full speed 1Gbps. We then tried a wireless modem from Verizon and it worked as expected.

The keyboard is very nice for a laptop. The mouse pad on the laptop is fine but we prefer a normal mouse. We present a USB mouse made of Roswell (a cheapo one for $ 4) and it worked immediately. The 4GB RAM were fully accessible, thanks to 64-bit operating system (both were the OEM and our own win7 64 Ultimate).

All we get because this is a car charger. We have a standard laptop briefcase, it fits perfectly fine.

Overall we are pleased with this laptop and buy another one in a few months is expected.

Acer AS5742Z-4685 15.6-Inch Laptop (Mesh Black)