Acer Aspire 7720-6604
Posted by hatim
more pics here
A friend of mine who was coming to Pakistan from USA for vacation was kind enough to order an Acer Aspire 7720-6604 laptop from newegg.com. I have previously used newegg.com and like their service. Initially I had waited for the launch of Apple Mac Book Pro with Penryn processors, but after the launch I was not very impressed with the specs. It was same MacBook Pro with a little better processor. I searched for the first few laptops and decided to buy this Acer machine for my self.
This laptop comes with Windows Vista Ultimate and an HDMI connector, but it does not come with a BlueRay. I am suspecting that with the recent new of impending demise of HD-DVD, upcoming high end Acer laptops will come with BlueRay as an option.
Overall I am satisfied with this laptop. It has a nice exterrior and an OK interior. Its finish is not as bad as it looks in the pictures. The real deal is in the specs. It has whooping 3 gig of RAM. I have nver worked on a machine with this much RAM before so it would be intresting. It also has 512 MB Geforce 8600 GT graphics card which would be very good for PC gaming. But I am no longer interested in gaming.
Windows Vista comes with trail/crap ware, alot of games from Oberon media with 60 minutes demo. The first thing I did was to uninstall them. They left their shortcuts, which I would delete once I log back to Windows. Windows Vista has neat looks, but Ubuntu's compiz is way much more configurable.
After having few hours with Vitsa, I wasted no time and installed Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy on to my machine. Apprently the 64-bit version of live CD was not able to work properly so I selleted for 32-bit one. Every thing worked fine except for sound driver. The sound card in this particular is based in intel high definition audio. I tried few Ubuntu recipies here and there, but I guess the real problem was that snd-hda-intel module had to be loaded with correct parameter, which was essentially one small line at the end of /etc/modeprobe.d/alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=acer
I chose for Ubuntu (and not Kubuntu) because of its better integration options (in terms of compiz and multimedia). I plan to make a Gentoo machine out of this laptop, but frankly Ubuntu fulfills most of my needs.
As for the bads of this laptop, I really don't like its keyboard. Perhaps it is because I am used to keyboard of previous laptop. Also this laptop get heated to some extent. I always thought that upcoming chips would probably produce less heat as they consume lesser power, but it is almost the same. I would recommend and one who has a need for a serious devlopment machine to get this laptop. I actually got it for a very good price (1368.51 US$, or around 83000 Pak Rupess at the time). Hopefully this laptop would be a good investment.
