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Acer TravelMate 4720-6727
Average Customer Rating
(5.0 out of 5)
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Awesome laptop
(5 out of 5) by Dave on Jan 11, 2008 (Pa)After doing a lot of research, I decided on this company/model. It comes preloaded (for now anyway) with XP Pro so I don't have to deal with Vista garbage. I have the option to upgrade later on if Vista gets it's act together. Runs very quiet and I've had no overheating problems as of yet, but I'm pretty obsessive about not blocking the fan and keeping air flowing to the processor at all times. I'm also pretty thorough about keeping dust out of it by giving it a blast with compressed air every so often, as this is also a big cause of overheating issues with laptops.
There's a lot of ports and interface jacks to accomodate just about any type of expansion or peripheral. It has 4 usb ports, 4-pin firewire (no power), type II pcmcia slot, , 5 in one card reader, DVD rewritable drive, VGA and S Video outputs, line-in, mic-in and headphone out jacks, ethernet jack, and built in wireless internet. I use mine for producing music and all I had to do was plug in my 24 bit audio interface card through the PCMCIA slot (E-MU 1616M) and boost the RAM and install all of my software and I can create high quality music on the go with this thing.
Hard drive is adequate at 5400 rpm, but 7200 rpm would be ideal for streaming samples off the hard disk when using software synthesizers and samplers. You won't find many laptops with 7200 rpm drives pre-installed. if I wanted to, however, I could connect an external drive very cheaply. I honestly haven't had the need to, though.
Battery life is incredible. Most laptops come pre-installed with junk programs added by the manufacturer, but Acer actually included a useful program for managing power and extending your battery life by allowing you to ration your power resources when you're not using processor intensive programs. You can also adjust the the LCD backlight settings to save power. Most of the time, you don't need screen brightness at 100%, and this is what usually eats up your battery life. The dual core processor also is more energy efficient. It comes with a 9 cell lithium ion battery, so what you get is an already powerful battery combined with a system to get the most out of it.
I lot of laptops have a seal on the bottom panel that indicates that you will void your warrenty if you break the seal and open the bottom panel. There was no such seal on the bottom panel of this computer. I don't know if that means that you can add RAM or tinker with your hard drive without voiding the warrenty or if they just don't bother to warn you, but it seems like you can remove this compartment and make changes to your memory and hard disk and still keep your warrenty valid. I haven't had to use my warrenty yet, though, so I don't know what the deal is yet as far as this goes. So far it's been a perfect laptop for me.
There's a lot of ports and interface jacks to accomodate just about any type of expansion or peripheral. It has 4 usb ports, 4-pin firewire (no power), type II pcmcia slot, , 5 in one card reader, DVD rewritable drive, VGA and S Video outputs, line-in, mic-in and headphone out jacks, ethernet jack, and built in wireless internet. I use mine for producing music and all I had to do was plug in my 24 bit audio interface card through the PCMCIA slot (E-MU 1616M) and boost the RAM and install all of my software and I can create high quality music on the go with this thing.
Hard drive is adequate at 5400 rpm, but 7200 rpm would be ideal for streaming samples off the hard disk when using software synthesizers and samplers. You won't find many laptops with 7200 rpm drives pre-installed. if I wanted to, however, I could connect an external drive very cheaply. I honestly haven't had the need to, though.
Battery life is incredible. Most laptops come pre-installed with junk programs added by the manufacturer, but Acer actually included a useful program for managing power and extending your battery life by allowing you to ration your power resources when you're not using processor intensive programs. You can also adjust the the LCD backlight settings to save power. Most of the time, you don't need screen brightness at 100%, and this is what usually eats up your battery life. The dual core processor also is more energy efficient. It comes with a 9 cell lithium ion battery, so what you get is an already powerful battery combined with a system to get the most out of it.
I lot of laptops have a seal on the bottom panel that indicates that you will void your warrenty if you break the seal and open the bottom panel. There was no such seal on the bottom panel of this computer. I don't know if that means that you can add RAM or tinker with your hard drive without voiding the warrenty or if they just don't bother to warn you, but it seems like you can remove this compartment and make changes to your memory and hard disk and still keep your warrenty valid. I haven't had to use my warrenty yet, though, so I don't know what the deal is yet as far as this goes. So far it's been a perfect laptop for me.