I have been on the great Hyderabad Laptop hunt for the past few weeks, asking myself what do I want from the laptop. Although I don’t like Laptops and prefer Desktops. But as I am moving from Hyderabad, can’t take my desktop and roam around. Anyway my desktop is already 8 years old. It has P4 and only 756 MB RAM. So I thought let it be with my parents.
So, what do I what from my laptop, as I like Desktops, it should be kind of my desktop replacement which can be carried easily. It should be future proof meaning I should not say after 1 year at least that “Oh!! I should have waited 2 more months to get the blah blah feature”. It should be able to handle latest or not so latest games ( I do play games occasionally like counter strike, Serious Sam etc) I do have some games like COD 4 etc which does not work on my NVIDIA 7300GT 512MB card currently in my desktop.
So, after my research I wanted features like Intel Core I5, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 500GB Hard disk (320GB was also okay), a good screen to watch movies (14 inch or 15.6 inch anything was fine for me), last but not least, it should have dedicated graphics card which should have fair performance. My budget was 35k to 45k. The configuration I was searching for was above 40k anyway. Regarding brands, I do like Lenovo and Acer. Other brands are also okay for me.
There are only a few laptops which satisfy my needs. Lenovo Y460/Y560, Acer 5740G Sony Vaio CW series and E series and DELL Studio laptops. There is one in HP, but that is way too ahead in pricing.
Lenovo y460/y560 is still not launched in India, I have waited long for this one and when found that they are selling Y460 for 1049 dollars in US, I dropped the idea to buy this one. Sony VAIO E series VPCEB16FG/B is a good buy but it has i3 processors and its price is around 47-48k. This can be bought if we ignore the processor, everything else is great and anyway its a VAIO. Dell Studio 15 with 1 GB dedicated graphics card (5470) is good, but I personally don’t like DELL. The graphics card offered is not that good also for the price.
So finally it comes to Acer 5740G. There are different models in 5740 series, I am talking about Acer 5740G with Core i5, 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB hard disk space and 1 GB of ATI RADEON 5650 dedicated graphics card. Rest every normal stuff is available.
I bought this laptop yesterday for 43.5K at Acer Mall (IT park at Parklane Secunderabad) including the backpack. I guess I could have got it at 42.5 or 43k at least, but that Acer Mall person took advantage of the situation where stocks of this particular model was over. He took Rs 500 for that backpack which he previously said that it is free. I would recommend to avoid that Acer Mall. But this price is better that Croma or other showrooms. I asked it at Croma and they quoted 45k.
The laptop looks decent, the sample HD video looked stunning. It has numpad which is quite handy. Touchpad has multi gesture but I hate laptop touch pads, I prefer to use mouse. The keys looks delicate but are comfortable. It has 4 USB ports, bluetooth, HDMI port, card reader, DVD writer, webcam. It comes with Windows 7 Home premium 64 bit. Windows experience index is 5.8. I am yet to explore more. Following are some pics.
acer 5740G
acer 5740G
acer 5740G
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