Acer Aspire 5100

[Thresh]

Is anyone familiar with these Laptops? I have a potential trade for my PC for one of these. Only thing I'll probably be using it for is WoW and internet surfing. I'd like to run wow on medium graphics at 1024x768, but I don't have much experience with laptops and gaming. I'd like to hear some opinions about this.

Specs:

15.4" Screen

AMD Turion 64 x 2 CPU speed 1.6 GHz

2GB DDR2 667

120GB HD

ATI Radeon Express 1100 (integrated and shared 128mb, able to boost to 256 and more)

 

[Jorsoft]

Should be able to run WOW-esque games on medium settings, possibly higher. The integrated graphics are going to be a big bottleneck for you, though. And no, you can't upgrade them.

As far as Acer, I've never been a fan. Had too many break on me and come back with weird problems. They didn't seem to hold up well physically, either, although they ma have fixed that in the last year or so.

 

[Thresh]

This is an 06' model. What was breaking on the Acer?

 

[Jorsoft]

If I recall correctly it seemed it was either the wireless card going bad or some kind of weird motherboard problem that would require replacement. It's been six months since I've worked on any (job change) but it was always stuff like that. We'd get the occasional hard drive or memory failure, too, but I don't remember those being more prevalent than any other major brand. The plastic casing, after a year or so, often looked like complete crap. Scratched and scuffed to oblivion sometimes. That could have easily been just because the people who were buying the Acers just wanted something cheap and didn't really care about the computer. I just don't have any fond memories of those 2006 models. We didn't sell an overabundance of them at my work but we did get a pretty high percentage of them back within 1-2 years with these problems. I'd definitely get a few more opinions, though, rather than relying soley on mine since I've had so many bad times with Acer. Maybe other techs faired better.