Acer Aspire 5750G
With an impressively low price of £530 the Aspire 5750G is the quintessential i5 laptop aimed at the casual user who also wants some grunt on hand for serious gaming and productivity. In fact it’s just about all the laptop most people will ever need.
The 5750G features Acer’s favoured flat top keys which are far more pleasant to use than they look although the trackpad is positioned just a little too far to the left of the deck for my liking. In common with most modern Acers, the 5750G is a pretty sleek and compact box of tricks.
The 16:9 LED backlit screen is colourful, bright and crisp making video playback very impressive and the speakers are pretty decent too making this a solid multimedia machine. With a 500GB hard drive you’ll have plenty of space for your photos, music and movies. Some may bemoan the lack of a Blu-ray drive, but at the price point that would be a little unfair.
A couple of things are absent though including any trace of USB 3.0 or Bluetooth. The CPU is the entry level i5 mobile chip yet it still has a turbo-boost speed of 2.9GHz and the Nvidia graphics card more than makes up for any shortcomings as the impressive 3DMark score shows.
The i5 laptop for everyman and indeed woman with cracking graphics.
Reg Rating 80%
Price £550
More Info Acer
Thanks to Laptops Direct for the loan of the review sample.
Apple MacBook Pro 13in
No i5 round-up would be complete without something fruity. I have to be honest I admit it’s been many, many a year since I owned a machine that wasn’t running either Ubuntu or Windows but I'd argue in recent years both have narrowed the gap on Mac OS. Today it’s more about the hardware than the operating system.
Luckily there’s nothing wrong with quality of the Pro’s hardware. An excellent 3x3 2.4/5GHz Wi-Fi card, a very fine backlit keyboard and sleek, hewn-from-solid aluminium body all make the Pro a deeply, moistly, lick-ably desirable machine though, for a bag of sand, no Blu-ray is a bit of a diddle.
That’s also a lot of money for a 13in screen with a lowly 1280 x 800 resolution, no USB 3 ports and only Intel graphics. On the other hand, at barely more than 2Kg it makes even the Sony Vaio C feel like a lump of lead and by a country mile it’s the smallest machine of the bunch.
Of course Apple fans will claim it’s the best simply by dint of it being an Apple but for the rest of us who haven’t succumbed to Cupertino’s magic a little more kit offered and a little less money demanded would make the MBP a far more attractive offering.
The alternative option. Sleek, light, cool but Biblically expensive and not that well spec’d.
Reg Rating 75%
Price £999
More Info Apple
Next page: Asus N53SV
COMMENTS
p**s poor screen resolutions
What is it with this new fad of crippling every new computer with a 1366x768 screen resolution? Seriously - a resolution that low should be limited to netbooks and screens <12". By law.
Not everyone is so blind as to need their desktop icons to be the size of their fist - and some people actually like having a bit of screen real-estate to work with. When will the manufacturers realise this?
I don't care if I have to pay a (small) premium to get a proper screen, but the option should *always* be given.
(yes, I know the Dell E6420 does give the option - but that doesn't excuse the fact that it is crap and is a total disgrace to the Latitude name.)
And any manufacturer that thinks 1366x768 is ok on a 15" screen should be banned from making any more computers. Ever.
For the record.
If any of the machines had given me a metrosexual wank-spasm I'd have automatically awarded them 100%.
Whiny crybaby fanbois
What a surprise, a flock of whiny apple fanbois up in arms like insulted scientologists because their overpriced underspecced shrinetop doesn't have the reviewer quivering in a post review metrosexual wank-spasm.
IPS Panel
Macbook Pro's use a TN panel, not IPS. Plus I also find the glass really annoying in terms of reflections (probably why I bought a 15" Macbook Pro with AG screen).
Not unreasonable of Acer
Unlike CRTs, LCDs have a native resolution, the resolution that has a 1:1 mapping between your desktop resolution and your display's resolution. The display physically can't go any higher.
Even if your OS allowed itself to be set to a higher res (there may even be hack tools for the GPU which allow this) it would still have to downscale to fit the physical resolution. And yes the answer is to plug in an external monitor or buy some hulking 17" laptop to get a higher res. At the end of the day, it's a tradeoff, although 1366x768 is still perfectly adequate for 720p content and video players would downscale 1080p content to the output window size too.
I am not surprised by your other concerns. Few laptop manufactures bother providing physical OS disks any more. Most stick the OS in a "recovery partition". Yes it is cheap of them and petty. Perhaps you can back the partition up with with a burner or they provide a tool to do it.
What you're asking from the HDMI port is never going to happen. HDMI is a client / server protocol. No laptop manufacturer is going to bother implementing some kind of multi purpose HDMI port. Just copy the videos from your phone onto the computer via an SD card or USB cable and play them that way.
