Home > Consumer Reviews > Acer Aspire 5738Z (15.6-inch LED, Intel Pentium Dual Core 2.0 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 250 GB, DVD-RW, Vista Home Premium, Dolby Sound, Webcam, WiFi)

I chose this laptop for several reasons: I've used an Acer for almost 4 years and have had no trouble with it; this particular model has 4GB of high speed RAM backed up by a reasonably fast bus.
The display is excellent and the machine is fairly fast, considering that it runs the dismal Vista. My plan was to install Linux but so far this has proved impossible. Over 50GB of the hard drive is guzzled by the operating system, by the way.

The bad part of this laptop is the touchpad - it is dire. No matter how I alter the settings, it manages to be both insensitive and over-sensitive at the same time. It does not respond well to being tapped yet it detects my palm too eaasily and sends the cursor all over the place. Getting rid of the ALPS driver and using the simpler Synaptics one didn't help much either. The best thing to do is switch it off (with the handy nearby switch) and use a regular mouse. This is a pity as my other Acer has a perectly usable touchpad. How did you get this so wrong, Acer?

So, quite a good laptop generally and the price is coming down so you're getting a good spec for a fair price, but it isn't perfect and Vista doesn't help. Whether it's worth taking the 'free' upgrade to Win 7, I don't know. (Not quite free, they want £13 carriage for it!)

Great laptop
Pros:
- Widescreen seems larger than 15.6
- Fast processor
- Free upgrade to windows 7 (from acer website - check for details)

Cons:
- Comes with loads of unnecessary software installed

I recommend this laptop - this is the best price i've seen it for

best laptop ive had so far paid £12 for windows 7 upgrade which makes laptop even better this is the one to get

I bought this as a replacement for a 5 year old laptop for my wife. It is much better than we expected and in spite of all the warnings about Windows Vista she has found it very easy to use and much better than her old and slow Windows XP version on a Fujitsu Seimens. A very large and clear screen (excellent for her photographs), a good keyboard (except the touch pad which she hates!), excellent battery life and a good range on the wireless connectivity makes this an ideal choice for her. The built in webcam is excellent since she uses the machine extensively for Skype usage with our family.

A more comprehensive manual (a 6 page flimsy is really not on for a machine like this) would be a decidedly valuable addition. Probably the only thing preventing a 5 star rating!

One slight niggle it the cumbersome clip and lock for opening up the closed machine.

I think for the price this was a good product but I am a bit worried that there are certain features on it which seem to be a bit flimsy.
1 The button to open the laptop would be difficult for anyone with problems with their fingers.
2 The disc drive is very flimsy difficult to get to and I have already had a problem which I have had to contact Acer about because the disc drive stoped working. I am still waiting on an answer to this and found it difficult to contact them. It is working again but you can tell it just doesn't seem right.
Over all it is a nice machine but if it turns out that the disc drive is faulty after only having it for a few weeks it doesn't bode well.