Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48905 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Acer
• Model: Aspire 5315
• Released on: 2007-10-31

Manufacturer's Description
Overview

The Aspire 5315 delivers ultra-affordable entertainment performance for students and home users, encased in Acer’s new, stylish Gemstone design. Utilising the Intel® Celeron® mobile processor, Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950, this notebook possesses powerful multimedia potential. Versatile communication is also in the mix, with full wired and wireless connectivity and integrated webcam for face-to-face contact when chatting to friends or family.

Affordable Performance

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

A great first laptop.
I look after IT for a small business. I've bought a lot of laptops for company users. It's a shame to see this particular model getting less good feedback, so I thought I'd add my two penn'orth:

I have bought and setup two now, both for senior surfers, but it would equally make a great machine for a teenager.

If you look at the £299 version of the Acer 5315 you will see that on the whole it gets great reviews, well this machine is all of that and more. If you read those reviews you will see the comment repeated a couple of times wishing they'd gone for the better version with Windows Vista Premium, and some chose to pay the extra £50 to upgrade after purchasing the £299 laptop. Well, at time of writing, for just £38 more this laptop is supplied with that better version of Vista Premium Operating System software AND a larger 120GB hard drive AND a built-in webcam. It's a no-brainer really!

The laptop has a great bright display.

The built-in webcam works really well - the images are very clear and much better than I expected.

The machine feels sturdy enough and I think that the black glossy outer lid, and cream-coloured interior makes for a great-looking personal laptop.

The laptop does come with 120GB hard drive; some folk have commented that they only got 50GB; the drive is partitioned into two areas; the C: drive contains the Vista operating system, and is normally where you would install any additional programs that you choose to add - this drive probably has about 30Gb to spare; the D: drive is set aside for your data, and it is probably seeing this set aside 50GB which causes folk to think that they only have 50GB. It has plenty of capacity for the market it is aimed at (and 40GB more than the £299 version which seems to be gaining better reviews!!).

Both of the laptops which I have now handled have had power supplies which get warm and chirrup! It's a little annoying, but really not a big deal. I have a professional Sony laptop with a PSU which really does get too hot to handle.


A few tips for new owners of this laptop:
Make sure that you use the Acer recovery program to create your recovery discs fairly early on. It's a straight-forward process. You will need two DVDs (write-once +Rs or -Rs will be fine at about 70p each). It is quite common for budget machines to be supplied without Operating System and Program discs. It is vital that you make your own ASAP in case you have problems later. Just create the discs, label them, and put them away somewhere safe - you will probably never need them (NB you have to create a password as you do this, make sure that you note this with the discs).

The touch pad takes a little getting used to for new users. Nothing wrong with the machine, it is just what we used to term 'mouse gymnastics' - learning how to click and how to move around - how hard to press etc. You are very likely to experience some interference when typing if you leave the touchpad settings at default; commonly machines are supplied with the default setting that the touchpad is disabled when you type, this is not the case with this laptop and you will find that if the heel of your hand hits the touchpad when you're typing odd things will happen. Simply change the settings; in the system tray (bottom RHS) you will see a small icon representing the touchpad and buttons; double left-click this and you'll get a dialogue box with all the cursor and touchpad setup settings. Select the tab (small label at the top) for the touchpad; on the page for the touchpad, near the bottom, you will see a check box marked something like 'disable touchpad when typing' - put a tick in this and click Apply or OK. You should now be able to get on much more easily without interference to your typing.

There's a similar setting in this area which you might wish to consider; by default a tap on the touchpad is exactly the same as clicking the left button. This again can cause grief to a lot of new users; you may only want to move the cursor across the screen, but if you contact the touchpad with just a little too much force it will count as a click, and you will find yourself repeatedly selecting things that you never intended to. You can adjust the settings to try and find a setup which allows you to use the facility without problems, but you may find that for the early weeks of learning you are better off simply disabling the touchpad tap feature and using the buttons for clicking.

I would recommend that you don't use the 'Free for 3 months' Norton anti-virus trial, because after that it'll cost you about £50 per annum. Furthermore, Norton is a great anti-virus program, it will keep your machine very secure, but, it is also well known for being a considerable burden on the machine. Just click the box in the reminder pop-up to be not reminded again and never run or install the Norton trial. Probably the best Anti-virus for home use is the very well known and respected AVG Free - just Google for this and install it. Windows firewall works fine. Simply not using the pre-installed Norton will probably cause your laptop to run more quickly!

Finally, if you want to squeeze slightly more performance out of your machine, pop over to the Crucial UK website, follow their prompts to select your laptop's make and model and they will recommend an additional 1GB of RAM delivered for about £30 - this will deliver a noticeable performance improvement.

In my opinion it is a great (bargain!) first laptop.

Very good
I got this laptop for Christmas, and it is a perfect laptop for me for doing work. But I would not recommend this laptop to a person who would just want to play games on it, as it dose not have as much memory as I thought it would have. Overall a good buy.

A lovely budget laptop
I bought this laptop for my daughter and it is a lovely, fuctional laptop. It doesnt feel cheap like some of the other budget laptops. The computer comes ready loaded with Vista premium and it is easy to get up and running on wireless.