Acer Aspire 5750G - Getting More for Less

Tired of using office laptops, I finally decided to buy my own laptop about two months ago. I looked around online, and what I really wanted was an Acer Timeline. Unfortunately I couldn't find one locally, and there wasn't anyone travelling whom I could ask to get me one from elsewhere. So, I decided to look through what laptops I could find in the market.

I wanted two contradictory things: a laptop that can run games, and will give me more than 5 hours of battery life. A dedicated gaming laptop was out of the question (besides the fact that I couldn't afford one), so I needed to find something that had switchable graphics.

Dell was always going to be out of the question. The Vostro was out of range (and didn't fit my requirements all that well anyway), and the Inspirons are so ugly. I don't know what's wrong with Dell, frankly, their new Inspirons look exactly like the old Inspirons, and they're so chunky.

HP Pavilion looked okay, but I'd heard that they tend to overheat, so that was out. I've heard good things about the ProBook, but there was just something about it that didn't appeal to me.

Most folks around me are a bit leery about Acer, because it's a very "Chinese" company, and they expect the quality to be about the same. But frankly, out of all the laptops I saw, the only one that stood out was the Acer Aspire 5750G, with an NVIDIA GT 610M video card.

I snagged it for USD 601 (i.e. the equivalent), and managed to talk the guy into upgrading the RAM to 8GB and throwing in a laptop bag as well. Not a bad day's work.

After two months of intensive usage, I'm still happy with my purchase, though a few things do bother me:

1. The laptop gets hot when I play games. Really hot. The surface not so much, but the vents throw out hot air like anything. I'm now planning on getting a notebook cooler before anything goes wrong.
2. When playing "Transformers: War for Cybertron", sometimes the textures for everything don't load. The settings are on high, so I'd expect the game to run slow if it can't render (like it does on "Mercenaries 2" when I have water effects on), but it runs okay, but the textures don't load. Maybe it's the heat, but I can't be sure.
3. How can I better utilize RAM to squeeze a bit more speed and/or battery life out of the thing? I can get nearly 6 hours if I'm reading, or playing mahjong, but dang it, I want more! Reducing the page file to force more into memory seems to be a divisive strategy, and I'm not sure how it'll effect my games.

By the way, does anyone know how to further decrease battery discharge? I've got it down to between 6,500mW and 7,500mW (with office applications and browser running), but I'd like to see how low I can get it with the laptop still usable.

 

hey acer aspire has intergrated intel graphics and nvidia card, in nvidia control panel choose physX processor to "CPU" if u choose GeForce ur laptop gets overheated while playing games. playing games in cpu processor doesn't get that much heat. finally all latest 2012 games play smooth in cpu settings too. try it....

 

Good advice. I'll try it when I get home.