Thursday, January 25, 2007

My new Acer Ferrari 5000 Laptop

I ordered a new Acer Ferrari 5000 from Amazon on January 2nd and received the laptop on Jannary 4th. Opened up the box, installed the battery, connected the power supply, and turned the new laptop on. :-( NOTHING!!! No lights, no screen, no fan, no sound, just DOA!

Called Acer's tech support and after being on hold for about 30 minutes they told me to try several things to try to revive my laptop. Nothing worked! So I sent the laptop in for repair on January 5th. Acer received my laptop on January 9th, I got an email from Acer on the 10th stating that they had received it. Then on January 12th I received another email stating that the laptop had been repaired and gave me the tracking number. After several attempts to have FedEx deliver my laptop I finally had to drive down to the FedEx station and pickup my laptop after being repaired.

Anyway, I received my laptop back from repair on January 18th. Acer said they had to replace the motherboard. Everything is working fine. I have been using it now for about a week so thought I would post my first impressions with this new laptop.

Again it is a Acer Ferrari 5000 with a AMD Turion 64X2 TL60 processor running at 2 GHz with 2 Gigs of RAM, 160 Gig Hard Drive, Multi-DVD recorder, wireless WiFi, blue tooth, 15.4 in. CrystalBrite WSXGA+ screen. Overall I am pretty happy with my new laptop and it is pretty. What I don't like is first the heat. It puts out a lot of heat and blows it out on the right side, right where I use my mouse. It would of been so much better if they would blown the heat out the rear. Second, the mouse is pretty and is blue tooth. If you constantly use the mouse then it works just fine. If it sits for a minute or two and then you try to use it, it acts like it lost the blue tooth connection. You have move it around a lot before it finally re syncs and is usable again. Also there is no way to turn off the batteries. The batteries are rechargeable but it would of been nice to have a switch to turn off the batteries instead of having to take out the batteries.

The keyboard is nice with a bit ergonomics which I like and find it easy to use. The laptop itself is fast but not blazing fast. It came with Windows XP Professional and I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate but can't get all of the drivers yet that Vista requires. Guess they will be out when Vista comes out on the retail selves.

1/26/2007
Another comment about my new Acer Ferrari 5000 is that it came with Windows XP Professional, however, the hard disk was formatted as FAT32. Why? It should be formatted as NTFS, especially if you are going to upgrade to Vista and you may as the laptop is "Vista Premium Ready" and you can received Vista free. Also Vista upgrade will require that the hard disk is formatted as NTFS!

I will be posting more about this laptop as time goes on.