Thinking of buying aspire 5535 bit more info is appreciated

Hi all (my first post)

I am thinking of buying acer aspire 5535 with the following spec:
CPU= Amd dual-core QL62
RAM=1GB DDR2 667Mhz
HDD=160Gb sata
Optical drive= dvd+-rw dual layer +r
Graphics=ATI radeon HD3200 integrated chipset (amd780g)
OS= Vista home basic

I will be using it for office apps, web and transferring miniDV to the laptop via firewire (which I will buy as an express34 or 54 card) and making dvds from the transferred content.

I would like to know from those who have an aspire 5535 what did they get in the box apart from 5535 laptop , battery and AC power supply....

Did you get manual(s), leaflets, driver/software CDs ,DVDs and so on...
Also did you get a Windows Vista recovery CDs/DVDs from acer, or did you have to make them by burning you own Cds/DVDs ?

What brand is/are the ram, harddisk and the dvd writer in your aspire 5535?

I would also appreciate if you can point me to some good reviews on this laptop (one that gets their hands dirty), I googled all I could find were some mediocre reviews.

Thank you very much.

PS. If you know something horribly wrong with aspire 5535 don't hesitate.

 

Hi welcome to the forum.

First thing i'd do with the laptop if you bought it would be to upgrade the RAM on it to at least 2gb. Vista will eat up a lot of that RAM before you even do anything like surf ther web, or watch a movie etc.

Acer won't send you any cd/dvd's with windows or any or your drivers on, these have to be created yourself but is a very easy process.

I have a 5920, but the 160gb HDD I have in mine is the WD1600BEVT, don't know if yours would be the same, but I guess it would be a big possibility.

RAM in my laptop is Samsung and Nanya.

 

- You are not getting any CDs/DVDs, your laptop comes with a recovery partition(you'll find out you're missing like 10GB of your HDD) from which you can burn the CDs.
- No manuals except a Quick Guide and/or User's Gude.
- Acer usually ships WD HDD.
- RAM - mine(AS5715) came with Nanya
- My laptop came with Pioneer DVD Burner but I think Acer ships burners from different brands.

As bangert said you MUST get another gig of RAM otherwise you'll see Vista suffering. Other than that the laptop seems more than capable to do what you want it to do.

 

Thanks for the info, bangert & ATG
I will definitely get 2gb of ram.

-As for making recovery cd/dvd I assume I will have to run some program found in “start”
and when prompted put a cd/dvd in the optical drive and that is about it?

Once I have made Recovery cd/dvd can I
1)-delete the recovery partition and use that 10gb of space? (I want to dual boot and want
as much space as possible)

2)-If the recovery partition is removed, and I wipe my hard disk (completely start till the end)
can I install windows using the recovery cd/dvd I made ?

3)-If I were to remove the hard disk that acer provide and replace it with another hard disk
got from some store (say the hdd from acer crashed and the laptop is out of warranty)
then can I use the recovery cd/dvd I made to install windows? (reason I am asking is that
some companies monopolize by not adhering to industry standard therefore you are
force to buy parts from them for a higher prize)


-For drivers do I have to download the drivers from acer website and put it in a cd/dvd?