Acer Aspire 5742

Brought my acer aspire 5742 from Comet for £375.00. Extremely fast with high quality graphics. My only thing with this laptop is it has a very sensitive mouse. If you hover the arrow over anything that can be clicked onto it will pick up the body-heat form your fingers and click on. This means when reading/working the arrow must always be parked in blank areas.

I had an Aspire before, and it was fine. Ordered a new model and payed for it to be checked before it left Acer. No CD-rom drive! Awaiting e-mail from Acer, but not happy with the thought that I might have to send it back.

Having had a Toshiba laptop for over 3 years which had limited capacity and performance, I decided on a new Acer Aspire 5742 basing my choice on Which? surveys and recommendations from friends. Although I've only had the Acer for under a week, it is turning out to be a very competent machine with a very fast Intel Core i5-460M processor and 4GB memory. I purchased it from John Lewis as I do all my electrical and electronic equipment because of their second-to-none service, very keen pricing and excellent warranties, and the price was £549.95 (£550 to you and me!). My only criticism so far is that it has only one speaker incorporated in the laptop which I didn't notice prior to purchase, I presumed all laptops had a pair of speakers and I think Acer have been rather penny-pinching not to have specified two, the extra cost must be almost negligible! But that wouldn't have deterred me from purchasing the model as more serious listening is done via headphones or external speakers. The casing of the Acer doesn't seem to be as solid or well finished as the old Toshiba, they are both made in China but obviously to the respective manufacturers specifications. I will add further reviews in due course after I have used the machine more.