Acer 7720G has some serious design faults,

Thursday, 17 March 2011

*Acer 7720G has some serious design faults*,
10 Feb 2010
*This review is from: Acer Aspire 7720G 17-inch Laptop, Intel Core 2 Duo
T7300 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD, GeForce 8400M Graphics (Electronics)
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire-7720G-17-inch-Graphics/dp/B000VZZ70C/ref=cm_aya_orig_subj>*

Let's get straight into the faults:

The touch pad is an Alps touchpad - they are awful. My advice don't buy
a laptop unless it has a Synaptics touchpad. The Alps touchpad gives
false contacts all the time. It is not recessed but flush leading to
enormous amounts of accidental palm, finger brushes which are
interpreted as deliberate movements. It ends up jumping the cursor all
over the place. A design fault. The Alps software is a subset of that
provided by Synaptics. A lot of jigging around to make it work right,
then you use another laptop with a Synaptics pad and all you want to do
is swap...

The cooling for this laptop is completely inadequate. The Nvidia GPU
runs hot all the time reaching 73 degrees centigrade very easily,
shortly after the machine will just shut itself off right in the middle
of whatever you are doing. It needs an active cooling pad with twin fans
to keep the core temperature down to a manageable 56 degrees. You cannot
use this laptop on your lap. You cannot use it on a flat desk as the fan
intake is on the bottom and there is insufficient room to allow free
flow of air. A MAJOR design fault that should start you looking elsewhere.

The keyboard is OK but the cursor keys are buried amongst the other keys
and are difficult to find when touch typing. I removed the extra dollar
and pointless Euro key either side of the cursors to help me find the
cursor keys. Bad keyboard design in my opinion.

Vista is slow on this machine. That is not the fault of Acer. XP runs
quickly on this 7720G.

Acer don't seem to sell this machine with an XP licence option.
Ridiculous but that may be due to Microdolts. XP drivers are not
available from Acer Europe but Acer Panam have all the drivers on their
site. XP installs and works but the Broadcom ethernet driver can cause
regular crashes. I disable the Broadcom ethernet device in control panel
and the crashes seem to go away.

It is heavy and a large laptop, more of a portable desktop than a
laptop, especially with regard to the big screen.

The screen is good and bright, the hard disc is sufficient, the DVD is
fine. It has SD memory slot and two external VGA ports, neither of which
I could make work on my system with XP. The speakers have sufficient
amplification.

The battery is very poor, less than two hours initially and within 3-4
months of normal that was down to 20-30 mins. I guess that they have
bought in pretty cheap battery technology.

In general the Alps touchpad alone is enough to make me avoid buying
Acers in future. That said, the machine is robust and capable as longas
you can avoid the design and ergonomic faults. I can't, I use this dman
machine 18 hours a day. I loved my last Acer, an Aspire 1640. I want it
back, this 7720 annoys and niggles and is a pain. When it dies I will
not care a tinker's cuss.

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