Laptop from dieselboss

I think if you shop around you can get a better deal. This is pretty standard price for this laptop if your able to shop around you can most likely get a better machine for cheaper. I use http://www.slickdeals.net for many of my purchases. I see i3 going for cheaper then this price regularly.

I also would suggest you put a SSD drive in the machine if your planning on using it as a GPS navigation and have it running while your going down the road. Vibrations are not good for normal hard drives. Load times will drastically improve with a SSD upgrade also. I definitely advice against using a laptop while driving down the road without a SSD in it.

 

I have the Acer Aspire 5742Z. It's a great little machine. Got mine at Memory Express.

 

I have an Acer Aspire 7551 that I picked up a month ago at Walmart for $470. I was concerned about it's durability, since every laptop I had before it was a business-class, built to be rugged type machine, with slightly lower specs than the others. My concerns were layed to rest last weekend, when I was home with my family. My daughter got a dog, a stupid puppy, funny, I said no dogs, but that's another rant somewhere else. Anyhow, laptop was on desk, three feet off a hard linoleum tiled floor, I had a mouse plugged into it, and the cable from said mouse was hanging down, nearly touching the floor. Puppy grabs mouse cable, takes off running, pulling one Acer Aspire off the desk, crashing onto the hard linoleum floor, puppy continues his sprint through the house, with laptop banging around in tow. I ended up with a small chip taken out of the bezel around the screen. That was the ONLY damage. A dab of superglue put the piece of plastic back in it's place for good, otherwise the laptop works just fine. I'm still angry at the dog, or maybe at my wife and daughter who got the dog, after I sad not to.

 

Hello Jaycee.

Here is the scoop on our laptops:

1. We chose Dell as our laptops of choice about 8 years ago. After getting several of them out on the road, we starting getting hard drives failing (crashing) because they couldn't overcome the vibration of the truck. (In fairness to Dell, I hear that they have become more robust over the years, but cannot give you empirical evidence of that in a semi-truck from direct experience because we stopped selling them.)

2. So, after about two years with Dell, we sought out a new vendor and settled on a deal with Acer after too many hard drive crashes and tech support based in India on the Dells and have been with Acer ever since. I think in the last 6 years we have had a grand total of 2 laptop failures reported - one was a hard drive crash and one was eaten alive by viruses due to the driver's surfing habits.

3. WE will NEVER be able to compete on raw pricing ALONE on any laptop against multi-million dollar sites or laptops - EVER. I will never have the rock-bottom lowest price on Model "X" or "Y" on a laptop product because we do not buy 1000 or 10,000 units at a time like you will find at BestBuy, Walmart, NewEgg, etc.

SO, if you are a computer savvy user and have the time and experience to set up and configure Windows and the associated programs that you want on it, and maintain and troubleshoot problems that may occur on it down the road, then just seek out the lowest price on a system that meets your computing and durability needs and get it. Again, my favorite online technology/electronics site is NewEgg.com and my favorite brick and mortar stores are Fry's Electronics and BestBuy.

4. There is a percentage of drivers and/or their families who are NOT comfortable with poking their way around a laptop yet, and THAT is the audience for our systems.

So, we created the "Ready to Roll" program means that any laptop we send requires that you do NOTHING MORE THAN TURN IT ON AND USE IT. The system has been turned on, battery charged, all Microsoft service packs and security updates installed, bloat-ware removed, any additional software that they buyer purchased installed (like CoPilot GPS for trucks, Driver Log programs, Microsoft Office, email, etc.) , all hardware drivers updated to latest versions, free anti-virus installed, and the system optimized for truck usage by correctly configuring the system power settings, background programs, and automatic updating configurations, and finally a file and registry cleanup and defragmentation.

The above process takes about 4-5 hours from the time you open the box on a new computer.

Then, once the driver has the laptop they can always call from then-on from home or on the road when they have questions and problems with it, even with problems that they caused <grin>

So it's all about your computer skill level verses pricing and service. The laptop is solid either way. As you can see, several other users have confirmed with a thumbs-up on their experiences with the Acer mid-level systems.

Hope that helps and happy hunting.