Acer Aspire AS5542-5416 LX.PHA02.110 Notebook PC – AMD Turion II Dual-Core M500 2.20GHz, 4GB DDR2, 320GB HDD, Blu-Ray/DVDRW, 15.6″ Display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Blue

Acer Aspire AS5542-5416 LX.PHA02.110 Notebook PC – AMD Turion II Dual-Core M500 2.20GHz, 4GB DDR2, 320GB HDD, Blu-Ray/DVDRW, 15.6″ Display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, Blue Review

Purchased here (via J&R), great price on a bluray packing 15″ laptop. 16:9 screen is great for watching movies. Screen looks great, watched Ratattouie (Pixar) DVD and The Bank Job bluray. Both movies looked great. Sound is Dolby Digital, and sounds great on headphones. Built in speakers sound terrible. Via even a cheap pair of headphones, the sound is superb. I heard sounds on Ratattouie that I never heard before.

Here’s some good news: The HDMI port supports both video (duh) and Audio! Yay! When connecting the HDMI to my receiver, the ATI video driver popped up a warning that Audio is not supported. But clicking “help” opened a page basically saying that this is a generic message to warn users that a video card prior to Radeon 2xxx series does not support audio over HDMI, but anything later (including the one on this laptop, the 4200) DOES in fact support Audio. And a quick test (of those two movies) proved that it was Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. The included movie player from Acer sent 1080p and 5.1 sound out the HDMI, and it seems that MS Media player did too. So no additional software is needed to output to 5.1 with both BR and DVD. One final note on movie watching: The Acer movie player worked flawlessly, but when I tried MS Media Player, it stuttered often and was annoying. Figures. So stick with the included (and set as default player) Acer movie player.

Gaming is NOT recommended. I grabbed the first game disc I had lying around that I had both the disc AND the install key (always hard to find both when you need them), and it was Call of Duty World at War. It was awful. At the default 1024×768, it was an unplayable slide show, and at the lowest settings (640×480 and every possible feature set to low) it was still an unplayable 5-10 fps. So that was disappointing, but not a show stopper as we already have two high-end gaming computers in the house, and really what did I expect for under 6 Benjamins?

I purchased this primarily to have a portable Bluray playing laptop and it fits the bill perfectly. As of this writing (2/1/2010), it is the cheapest Bluray playing laptop on Earth (or that I could find anyway, and believe me I spent/wasted a lot of time searching!).

I have another 2-year old Acer Aspire, also a 15″ widescreen, that is heavier with a worse keyboard than this model. I really am happy with the fit and finish of this model. The added keypad makes the keyboard sit left-of-center, which takes a little getting used to, as does the multi-touch touchpad, which is sensitive and hitting it accidently with a 2nd finger causes the mouse to jump around. The vertical scrolling feature on the right of the pad isn’t very accurate (had the same problem on my older Acer). We use Toshiba laptops at work and their scrolling feature is definitely better.

Some other non-issues: not many stickers. Not much bloatware at all. Comes with MS Works SE, which DOES read and write word and excel files (you just can’t set those as the default save/open option). Works SE is advertised based but it gives you the option to purchase the non-ad version. MS Office Student is 60 day trial. The 320GB drive is a single partition (yay!).

That’s about it. A great deal on a bluray laptop that works great.