Acer Aspire V5-122P Owners' thread

Or maybe Acer will release a similar model with Kabini

 

V4-122p-0646 is now on the Microsoft Store for $379: Buy Acer Aspire V5-122P-0646 Touchscreen Laptop - Microsoft Store
Difference between this and the -681 is that the -646 has Win 8.1 preloaded, -646 has Win 8.0 preloaded (with free update to 8.1).

Also if you're looking for a cheap Kabini laptop, unfortunately 14" (and 25W CPU): Buy Lenovo IdeaPad S415 Touchscreen Laptop - Microsoft Store
With A6-5200 25W Kabini quad core.

 

Lenovo IdeaPad S415 Touch 14" TouchScreen Laptop 4GB Memory 500GB Hard Drive IDEADPAD S415 TOUCH - 59385549 - Best Buy
$380 for that S415 A6-5200 Kabini quad from Best Buy on clearance, not bad.

I hope Acer does another 11.6" Aspire V5 but with Mullins or Beema instead (maybe AMD will enable dual-channel too), keep the IPS display, keep the backlit keyboard, improve the cooling, improve the battery life and improve a few of the other quirks that plagued the V5-122P.

I'm 99% sure I won't be swapping SoCs lol, I was just more or less thinking outside the box. Back to reality.

 

Good find!

But according to CPU-World the A6-5200 is also single channel RAM? Seriously? Their biggest advantage is their IGPU, and they gimp it with single channel RAM? At least it's 1600MHz.

 

This site picked the V5-122p as one of the best inexpensive notebooks on the market. I have to agree. Acer has always had a knack for making bulletproof 11.6" notebooks (my son still uses my old 1410T in college) but with the V5-122p Acer really outdid itself. The only weakness the device has is really battery life and you can get an add-on for that. We got ours on sale at the MS store for under $300 with 6GB Ram, backlit KB, etc.

 

I agree. Just wish they would have at least thrown in a two antenna wi-fi card for crying out loud, and a little larger capacity battery.

I want to see a similar setup with a 25W Kabini though. I would love an 11.6" of same form factor with the 25W Kabini quad core. The performance of the A6-1450 is just a bit underwhelming. It needs just a little more boost, and dual channel RAM.

 

Has anyone else put a Samsung EVO drive into one of these things?

I have a EVO 250gb, and my benchmark scores on the magician software are quite low:
Seq Read = 525, Seq Write = 449, Ran Read = 21285, Ran Write 16903

Is there a better ahci driver for the AMD chipset? Or should I just take this drive out and put something cheaper in?

 

The bottleneck in this system is the CPU. For an SSD you should be looking for low power consumption really, and the 840 EVO is probably the best there is at the moment.

 

If anyone with this machine and Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising if they could see if the game starts for you or not? I have tried and while the game menus start up fine, starting a mission the game crashes. This game works on an Asus Transformer T100 with Intel Atom and 2GB RAM, so not sure why it is having issues with this machine. Thanks.

 

Yeah the cpu stops RAPID mode being enabled. It did perform a lot better after following the advise on this forum to update the chipset but I was shocked at just how much the EVO underperforms. If I can get a cheaper SSD with similar performance I'd swap it out for the EVO and use that somewhere else. Though the battery life did improve to around 5 hours+ with the EVO.

 

How about the haswell pentium 3556u on this baby? If the inspiron 11 3000 can do it with 7-8 hours battery, I'm sure Acer can do it too.

 

I have a Samsung 830 in my V5. It's unfortunate that the lowest power consumption devices also tend to be the fastest and more expensive. With all the netbooks out there you would think that a manufacturer would design an SSD that is low power and low price in mind, sacrificing some performance because the rest of the netbook systems are the bottleneck.

The results you get from your drive though are typical: AnandTech | Samsung SSD 840 EVO Review: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB & 1TB Models Tested

Anandtech shows incompressible sequential READ at ~ 500MB/sec and write ~ 490MB/sec

 

I picked up this yesterday for $73 usd:

Newegg.com - Transcend SSD340 TS128GSSD340 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Was going to install it yesterday but something is screwed up with the Acer backup utility and it no longer creates a usb recovery drive. So I either have to do a clean install of Win 8.1, clone it or find another way to get that recovery partition.

Not sure I want to go through the pain of installing all the drivers again and get it running perfect, just so I can use the EVO in my gaming machine which only has a 180gb SSD....

 

Clean install, its easy and takes an hour at most. :thumbsup:

I've been using my DP to VGA/USB/Ethernet adapter at work everyday since I received it and curious to see what DockPort adapters adds to the game.

AMD Catalyst™ 14.2 Beta V1.3 Driver fixed Minecraft,

 

I just hate added dongles/cables if I can help it. I feel if I have to do that, then just buy a bigger laptop that includes the ports I need. But I guess if you leave that Acer converter cable at one spot and just plug in for external screen and ethernet it's not such a bad deal. I don't mind my USB to gigabit ethernet adapter because I only use it at home when I need large file transfers which is on rare occasion.

I'll have to give the Catalyst 14.2 beta drivers a run. Hopefully it fixes more than it breaks!

 

There are always better performing laptops in a larger form factor, this tiny laptop's apu or memory could go faster but I suspect keeping it cool would become an issue.
For what it is with a small thin 11" IPS display portable form factor easy to use keyboard and low price if you shop around it does what it was designed for in my opinion.

 

Just buyed this little computer. I can't find any info about installing linux ubuntu on this thing. Anyone knows something about that?

If everything goes well, the machine arrives tomorrow, but how's the performance on heavier programs like photoshop/illustrator?

 

This machine when I had it a few months ago was almost perfect for $400 or less. It had a color rich IPS display, good build quality, think and light w/ some models even having a backlit keyboard but there was one thing that wasn't great and that was the A6 quad cpu and it felt anemic/sluggish and the mediocre battery life. I'm wondering if Acer will update it and will update it with a more potent cpu, maybe a ulv i3 or the new bay trail M cpu, and increasing battery life of about 2+ hours then just adding $100-150 on top of the $400 would be reasonable and I would gladly pay for it.

Now there's a new laptop that just came out, called yoga 2 11, also thin and light at 3lbs and 0.7 thin, it has 5+ hours of battery, it also has a color rich IPS display at the same 1366x768 res like the Acer V5, but this one has the new quad core N3520 Bay Trail cpu and it is $599 directly at Lenovo but a lot cheaper at Best Buy for $499. Now I dunno how much faster the N3520 quadcore vs the A6-1450 quadcore. What do you guys think?

 

That Lenovo Yoga 2 11 looks pretty interesting. It appears lile the N3520 can outpace the A6-1450's CPU and GPU. Dual channel 1333 RAM support combined with 2.1-2.4 GHz clock speed looks to have more potential than single channel 1066 RAM 1.0-1.4GHz. It sure looks like a great performer and its nice to see another 11.6" with an IPS (10-finger touch) display. I personally would miss the backlit keyboard though. Thanks for pointing this new Yoga 2 out, I will consider it.

Sent from my XT1049 using Tapatalk

 

I'm quite pleased with the Z3740 Bay Trial in my Asus Note 8 M80TA. Looks like a decent combination in the Yoga. Is RAM limited to 4GR?

 

RAM is soldered and I don't believe Lenovo offer more than 4GB unless you go with the 11s at twice the price! It's just silly that gaming notebooks will throw expensive 8GB GDDR5 video RAM in a laptop, but these netbooks skimp on much cheaper system RAM, when 8GB should be the normal.

 

Previous gen Yogas supposedly had soldered RAM and a spare sodimm slot. I'd want to know if the N3520 version does too.

Sent from my XT1049 using Tapatalk

 

I upgraded to an adata 900-series sata3 ssd. First I cleared out all the apps I didn't have to have. then I used EaseUs partition manager home edition to first shrink the partition to about 5gb over the amount of used space, so it was 30-35GB main partition. Next, I connected the new SSD using a usb2=>sata interface, told it I wanted to clone the drive .. after I cloned it, just drop in the SSD in place of the hard drive.. Resize the partition back up to the available space on the ssd..viola..took a couple hours..no big deal..

Upgrading to 8.1 was a nightmare compared to doing this..

 

Does anyone know if the trackpad on this laptop is changeable for something a bit better. Out of everything on this laptop the only thing I don't like is the track pad, its just too noisy for me.

 

You could try and find a Synaptics touchpad? I asked here but didn't get any responses but I'm assuming most of the owners here are using ELAN touchpads. Mine is also loud. The hinge feels loose and like tolerances could be tighter.

 

Get yourself a decent bluetooth mouse and forget the track pad. Mine makes horrible noises when tapping. And when clicking it feels very loose. I avoid using it as much as I can.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Hello,
I've been a reader of this Thread for a while now. I use to work at a chain store where we sold the V5-122p but I didn't like the Model we sold, it was the Dual core A4. I knew I wanted something more. and I found it in the V5-122p-0643
it had everything I wanted in a Netbook. It handles all my daily work and surfing fine However that being said, I wanted More Performance. I purchased a Standard G.Skill 8gb DDR3 So-Dimm 3.5v CAS9 Latency and a TEAM Dark L3 120gb SSD
I have installed both and What a Difference that change made, 10gb of ram and a fast SSD it's exactly what this needed.
Here is the Link to the Ram I purchased $72 USD

Newegg.com - G.SKILL 8GB 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory Model F3-1333C9S-8GSL

Here is a Link to the SSD $80 USD

Newegg.com - Team Group DARK L3 T253L3120GMC101 2.5" 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I hope that helps shore up the "How Much ram will it take" Question.

Sorry to re ask, but if I wanted my CPU Clocked at 1.4 all the time, how would I do that?

 

Download and install CPUID CPU-Z for monitoring.
1. Plug in the power adaptor
2. Click on power icon on bottom right system tray (next to wifi)
3. Select high performance if not already
4. Click on more power options
5. Next to high performance, select change plan setting.
6. Select Change advanced power settings.
7. Select processor power management.
8. Set min power state plugged in to 100%
9. Set system cooling policy plugged in to passive.
10. Set maximum power state plugged to 100%
Click apply and ok.

Now select shut down - SLEEP when screen goes blank immediately press any key to wake it up.
You should now be running at 1.4GHZ locked. (at least for some time until motherboard cpu temp throttling unlocks it)

 

Hi All -

Have had my V5-122p-0649 for about a week now and am really enjoying it.

Added a Seagate SSHD 500GB hybrid drive and while its no where near the speed of a native SSD it really does make a difference. Also installed Windows 8.1 from an OEM CORE image with no issues. Simple install and then used slmgr to replace the key with the one in the BIOS.

Also, installed an Atheros T77H348.02 mPICE WiFi adapter to replace the single band card that it came with. I chose the Atheros card because I have another Acer laptop that uses it and have had surprisingly good luck with it. Its a dual band 5Ghz/2.4Ghz card and even with only the black wire attached as an antenna I am getting 6MB/s sustained throughput on the 5Ghz band. That's about a 50% improvement on the previous card on my 2.4Ghz band. And it wa like $10 shipped on ebay... Winning!

I did have to tape pin 20, but with this card there was no issue entering and exiting airplane mode. The keyboard controls work flawlessly. Also, the drivers are already installed, so its really plug and play.

One odd thing... The clock is often a few hours behind when its been powered off overnight and charging... Another thread identified a similar issue and this is likely a BIOS battery issues and that's what i suspected... I'll see if I can find a replacement cheap, otherwise I may need to RMA it...

Other then that, its a very nice notebook. I am actually replacing my V5-171 Core i3 ultabook with this one. The Core i3 is faster for sure, but not by much and the IPS screen more then makes up for any performance differences. In fact, I bought this to replace the V5-171 specifically because I wanted the better screen.

 

Is this the right one? So you did have to tape pin 20 then?
Lot of 2 Atheros AR5B22 Mini PCI E Cards T77H348 02 | eBay

 

Just installed my AR5B22 from eBay, works well even on the single antenna. Tape on pin 20, Airplane mode works just fine. And I can now see my 5GHz router. Well worth the upgrade I'd say. No drivers had to be installed, everything was working upon first boot.

 

Just recently got the Aspire v5 122p and I tried to update to 8.1. To do that i needed the required windows updates and i had some problems installing them so i went back to the store where i got it and asked for help on getting it updated. They just installed a clean version of w8.1 and now i have no drivers and no software and because of that it's a little slow.

If I install the newest BIOS version, reinstall windows 8.1 then install all the drivers will it go back to how it's supposed to be? Or should I try to get it back to to factory standard and start again? Even though the application for that got deleted and I don't have a backup, maybe i can ask acer for it.

And what should i choose, Atheros or Broadcom bluetooth and wireless, ELANTECH or Synaptics thouchpad? I tried the application that was supposed to show me what hardware I have but it didn't work. In Device Manager it says nothing except under network adapters where it mentions Atheros.

Also when i install the drivers should i install everything i need then restart or install a single driver, restart then move on to the next driver?

 

For normal use the built in shipped wireless adaptor fast enough for most applications or games, it's only worth upgrading if you want to be technically compatible with the fastest 5 GHz routers with a possible reduction in range.
For those that have done a 8.1 clean install just download and install the drivers on Acer's website and you are good to go.

 

For some reason Youtube and Twitch seem to be stuttering. Doesn't make much sense to me since the laptop manages to play csgo just fine. Any way I can fix it?

 

have you tried using a different browser?

 

I have just made my touch pad feel as good as new. This laptop is so thin, there is a piece of metal underneath the lower of the touch pad, I removed this and ever so slightly arced it. This means the touch pad now has less distance to travel before the button is clicked and now doesn't appear to be loose. It is a very delicate little machine and I admire the engineering for the price point. Be aware aggressive clicking will bend this metal over time as mine had, simple enough to repair though.

 

I am after an adapter that will allow me to fit a MicroSD card into this laptop. I cant seem to find one on eBay that will sit flush with the casing and wont protrude any.

Anyone using one?

Is this something that can be done on a relatively new machine or is it a fix for a touchpad that has had a lot of use?

 

I tried first Chrome. Firefox was slightly better, but it still stuttered.

 

Have you the A4 or the A2 processor? I don't have this problem on my A4
Do you have windows 8 or 8.1?

 

I have exactly the same problem with my Acer V5 IPS (AUO panel), which was replaced twice and both exibit image retention.. Can you say if they replaced your screen? Is the new panel free from burn in?

 

I don't see why you couldn't if you have no warranty to void. Makes the world of difference. Still not showing any signs of returning to how it was before.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

Hello there.

I have my Acer Aspire V5-122P and I have a questions about the battery:

I dont really know how to use it, in order to care and try to prolong its useful life to the fullest:

If I'm at home, should I use the battery permanently connected? or should I let carge completely to the 100%, and then unplug the power and let the battery discharge?

I also don't know if I can break the battery if it's permanently connected, or if it has any system that stops the charge when 100%...

How do you guys use the battery? What is the best way to use it?
thanks in advance.

 

Leave it plugged in. It will manage power itself.

 

I am after an adapter that will allow me to fit a MicroSD card into this laptop. I cant seem to find one on eBay that will sit flush with the casing and wont protrude any.

Anyone using one?

 

You can get very small ones for the raspberry pi, but you will struggle to get the card out without taking the bottom cover off.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

Yeah I did purchase one of these but it was to thick and wouldnt fit.

 

I have the wireless greyed out on a V5-122P I am sorting for someone. I have updated the driver (which was initially missing) and then updated to V2.10 from the Acer website. Reinstalled the driver after BIOS update and it is still greyed out and the WIFI button only enables or disables airplane mode. I'm thinking of reinstalling Windows from scratch now the BIOS update is in place. Any other ideas?

 

Just got the V5-122p back after sending it in to have the screen replaced, due to image retention issues.
I also put a note on the computer saying that the back-light bleeding was annoying, and hoped they could fix that too when installing the new panel.

So far, so good. The image retention issues seems gone, and maybe even better, almost no back-light bleeding. Yay! The back-light bleeding was driving me crazy in dark movie scenes. Now I can find some traces if I actively look for it, but it's mostly academic at this point.


Also, picked up a Samsung 840 evo 500gb today, and hope to do a clean install tomorrow. Let's see how that works out.

 

Please provide a step by step instructions on the SSD upgrade so newbie like me can benefit from the upgrade. Thanks much.

 

Can a mini sd card fit into the sd card slot without the end sticking out? Has anyone tried this?