The $348 Wal-Mart laptop: not all that bad, actually
Posted by Fred on November 2, 2007
I visited my local Wal-Mart this morning for the first of their Friday Secret In-Store Special sales. It was, of course, not really a secret. I decided to try to get the $348 Acer Aspire laptop, which seemed like a pretty good deal, knowing next to nothing about it. No model number, no specs, no nothing. The picture made it appear to be similar to the Aspire 4520-5803, an Athlon X2 dual-core machine with a 14.1 inch screen, 1 GB of RAM, 120 GB hard drive, DVD burner and Vista Home Premium. Wal-Mart sells that one for $568, so it seemed like a deal. That’s not what it was. Turns out it was an Aspire 5315, which comes with a 15 inch screen, 1.7 GHz Celeron processor, 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive, a DVD/CD-RW combo drive and Vista Home Basic. That model is not on Wal-Mart’s website, and I found no trace of it from any US reseller, unless you count all the people trying to turn a quick $100-200 profit on Craigslist. Comet has the UK version for £299.99, or about $625. It’s a pretty good deal at $350, given the decent size screen and 1 GB of RAM. $79 will upgrade it to Vista Home Premium and another $70 will get 2 GB of DDR2 RAM at Best Buy (Acer does the all-too-common scummy thing and sticks in two 512 MB SO-DIMMs, so upgrading from 1 to 2 GB means I’ll have two 512 MB sticks for the miscellaneous computer crap drawer).
I’ll channel Gearlog and post an Haiku review:
The hard drive is small
And it’s not all that speedy
$350 makes it all good.
Seriously, though, I was pleasantly surprised. Acer loaded it with a bunch of Acer management “features” and enabled the Sidebar by default, but they didn’t load it with all the crapware you get on a Sony or Dell laptop. No free AOL trials, etc. Just a 90-day trial of Norton Internet Security, which I can’t stand. I’ll delete that and either use one of my OneCare licenses or install ZoneAlarm. It also didn’t come with any productivity software, not even Works. I have one more install remaining of MS Office Home & Student Edition, so that’s taken care of. If not, there’s always Open Office.
The Wi-Fi performance is a real bonus. I fired it up and had a pretty strong 11 Mbps signal from the Richmond Omni hotel, which is four blocks away. That let me configure a few things and download Firefox, Flash and iTunes.
The bottom line is simple. This is going to be a machine that runs Office and Firefox 99% of the time. For that, the specs appear to be adequate. I’ll upgrade the OS and the memory so I can run Aero and get some of the mobility features that come with Vista Home Premium, but even then, the total price will be under $500.
What’s on the menu next week, Wal-Mart?
November 4, 2007 at 8:37 am
Good review! It’s amazing how cheap a laptop has become. I must be behind the times because those specs don’t sound so bad to me!
November 5, 2007 at 12:38 am
I bought one of these laptops and so far it’s pretty good for the price. I was the first one in the store to snag one and surprisingly, there was practically no one else there at that hour to grab some good deals. Upgraded the RAM to 2GB soon after bringing it home and made a lot of difference.
November 5, 2007 at 11:23 am
I too got this laptop — and I too was pleasantly surprised. Works just fine. With just IE open it’s using 80% of the memory — so more memory is recommended.
This is for my kids and I had intended to put PCLinuxOS on it — as that’s what they had been using on an old dell laptop. No luck. The wireless card is not supported by linux.
But for what my kids will be using it for — (web, chat, email, word processing) — it’s just fine with vista.
Lee
November 5, 2007 at 11:57 pm
I bought the laptop too. I want to upgrade to 2 gig or ram. Can you state specifically what I memory I should get to do the upgrade?
November 6, 2007 at 12:32 pm
@Ray:
The Acer uses standard DDR2 dual-channel 533 MHz SoDIMMs. Translated into English, you should be able to use any memory designated DDR2 laptop memory. Just don’t get the DDR2 desktop chips, which are much larger. To get to 2 GB, you’ll need to buy two 1 GB sticks, and trash the two 512 MB ones the laptop came with (or sell them on eBay). I bought mine at Best Buy for $35 each, but you can probably get a better deal online. I just got a 1 GB stick for a different laptop on eBay for 99 cents (I was the only bidder - must have been my lucky day).
November 6, 2007 at 6:35 pm
any one else having problems with touch pad on this laptop. I am also having toruble with the cursor, sometimes it just jumps to some other place on the screen????
November 7, 2007 at 6:42 pm
@Arte:
I’ve not noticed the trackpad problem, but these Synaptics pads can be a bit touchy(I have the same issue on a Toshiba laptop with a Synaptics trackpad). I’d try disabling tap to click, which you can do by right-clicking on the trackpad icon in the system tray. You might also check for an updated driver on the Acer website.
Another common problem is when the trackpad doesn’t work at all. Check to make sure you haven’t accidentally turned it off (Fn+F7 turns it on and off). If all else fails, you can always disable the trackpad and plug in a USB mouse. I usually end up doing that anyway, as I don’t care for trackpads.
November 8, 2007 at 8:22 am
I did not care for the trackpad’s performance either, so I opted for a cheap wired USB mouse that I picked up from circuit city for about $20. Other than that, I did just about the same things (waiting for $ to upgrade RAM and getting the upgrade to Vista Premium, next payday), and installed AVG free edition for anti-virus.
November 8, 2007 at 9:53 pm
Thanks…just to let you know I think we have an ALPS touchpad not synopics. I think I fixed the problem, I turned of the Tapping feature and The Tapping when type feature….Just as an FYI
November 13, 2007 at 10:25 am
[...] Best Buy, deals, reviews, trackpad, Wal-Mart, Windows Vista It’s now been almost two weeks since I picked up the Aspire 5315 at Wal-Mart’s Not-So-Secret Friday sale, so time for another field review. [...]
November 13, 2007 at 3:33 pm
How do I upgrade to VISTA PREMIUM for $79 like mentioned before?
November 13, 2007 at 4:01 pm
@Steve:
If you click the start menu, there should be a link for Windows Anytime Upgrade. If not, you can search for “Anytime Upgrade” from the start menu or visit the Windows Anytime Upgrade Store. You need to buy an upgrade license for $79 and get a Anytime Upgrade DVD. The whole process was painless, but a little time consuming. Hopefully you have a broadband connection.
November 27, 2007 at 1:47 am
Aside from Norton’s bloatware that really slows down any PC, Acer shoveled on a whole bunch of game demos and to get rid of them you have to uninstall them one at a time, then find and delete the last folder under Program Files and their folder on the Start Menu. THEN get Crap Cleaner from ccleaner.com to finish clearing up after Norton and the games. (Peter Norton should be ashamed his name is in such bloatware junk as Norton Internet Security!)
Acer Arcade is a DVD and other media playing program. There’s an easy to find hack to enable Media Player to play DVDs, then to make the audio work download AC3 Filter from ac3filter.net Now you can free up even more room by uninstalling Acer Arcade.
I made the recovery DVD-ROMs by using a USB 2.0 to IDE cable and temporarily connecting a DVD burner in one of my desktops. I got the cable from geeks.com I also made all the recovery CD-ROMs too.
Two of the DVDs restore the laptop to Out Of Box condition while the 3rd has all the 3rd party software and Acer utilities on it in case you want to reinstall them or have done a clean install of Vista. (FYI, Acer Game Station with all the game demos will install on Windows XP, but you still have to remove them one at a time.)
Turning off all of Vista’s “eye candy”, including the Sidebar, and switching everything to “Classic” theme gives this laptop a good boost in speed.
It has an 80gig drive but about 10gig is used for the hidden PQSERVICE partition that’s used for creating the recovery disks and for the Disk To Disk recovery feature. I’ll eventually delete that hidden partition and do a fresh install.
If you get one of the Anytime Upgrade DVDs, there’s a free program called vLite that will build a clean install DVD image for any version of Vista. The DVD comes in 32bit and 64bit versions.
The Aspire 5315-2153 has a Celeron 530, which is based on the Core Duo CPU but only has one CPU core. Unlike the Celeron 520, the 530 can run 64bit versions of Windows XP and Vista.
To help with the touchpad being so touchy, get the 1.19 BIOS update from Acer’s support downloads.
For the crazy upgraders, this laptop supports the Merom line of Intel CPUs as well as the Conroe and Conroe L (L for Light, in other words the Celeron 530 “Core Solo”.)
The Atheros WiFi card is plugged into a Mini PCI Express slot, so that’s upgradeable too. With the large “Thermal Door” off the bottom for RAM upgrade, you can see the CPU heatsink and heatpipe and the WiFi card. You can also see where a Mini PCI slot is NOT installed and also what looks like a not installed second Mini PCIe slot. For places (like school networks) where you need to register your computer’s MAC address, it’s on two lables on the mainboard under the Thermal Door.
My next adventure with mine will be figuring out how to install the laptop DVD-+R/RW/RAM dual layer burner I snagged on eBay for a bit over $25.
November 29, 2007 at 7:14 pm
the problem with the cursor jumping ocassionally is actually attributed to the touch pad being located off center, to the left. Your left thumb will tap the pad while you are typing. (Trust me, i finally figured that out). Just disable the touchpad and use a mouse, will cure the problem.
December 16, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I’m getting this laptop as a gift, and I’m pretty excited about it. However I’m worried that I’ll have to return it because all over the web I find comments about it overheating. Has anyone experienced this kind of trouble?
January 6, 2008 at 8:46 pm
i bought this laptop from walmart, n i feel that this is the best laptop for the price paid.
the best features i have seen in this laptop are wIfi, u can still upgrade memory to 2GB, Xbrite screen, and good performance with vista.
it wud have been gud if it had dvd writer, card reader, bluetoot and cam.
any ways its a good deal for $370 (after tax)
January 7, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I bought this as a Christmas gift for my high-school freshman offspring. Offspring used the heck out of it for the first two days, cursing the touchpad, etc. Then, the “?” keytop broke off. I couldn’t return it to Wal-Mart because I had bought it more than 15 days before, and I’m not sure how I can trust Acer warranty repair. The key doesn’t bother my offspring, who says the key works better than it did before.
I’m trying to update the RAM to 2Gb, but I can’t figure out how to get the “Thermal cover” off the back of the notebook. I’ve loosened all the screws, but can’t pry it up. What am I missing?
For its price, I think it’s an excellent value (even with the missing keytop.)