Sharp Actius AL27

I've been looking at this laptop ( http://www.sharpsystems.com/products/pc_notebooks/actius/al/27/ ). Anyone have any experience with it?

Thanks.

 

Sharp is not very popular in the US...but with the $100 rebate, it actually seems like a nice deal if the screen is as bright as they claim. You could also look at Acer (Aspire 1680, others) in this price range.

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

I got mine last week and seet about installing SuSE [Linux] 9.2 on it right away. The more I use it the more I like it. And that means a lot, really, given that my other laptop is a 17" Powerbook. The screen resolution of the Actius AL27 is really outstanding, as is the keyboard.

It's got a natively installed proprietary-esque version of Windows XP installed via a partitioned hard-drive that I'm not too happy about, but so far it's dual-booting the SuSE 9.2 and Windows XP pretty darned well.

ALso, I got Google News alert that this model is being sold at Sams Club for $1200something dollars. Getting that notice hurt. Cest' la vie..

 

I got the AL27 about a week ago at Sam's club. At least at the time they had the best price: 1277.82. And if you open a Sam's line of credit, it's six months same as cash. The offer runs until the end of 2004.

This is only my second laptop. My first was a refurbished Toshiba Satellite five years ago with the old dual scan screen, so the first thing about the Actius AL27 that struck my techno lust big time was the screen. It's super brite!!! Fortunaltely, it's got a nifty hotkey for alternating between superbright mode (sometimes it's actually TOO bright) and something more bearable in dim light.

Since my last computer was such a piece of crap and because I want to belive I made the right decision, I may be more than a bit biased.

It's pretty sleek, though I think the cover to the screen may be a bit flimsy--when I touch the back of it, the LEDs do their wacky thing. I kind of think the case on the back side of the screen should be sturdier.

Right out of the box, everything was fine EXCEPT mine came with one dead pixel. BUT I'm so in love with the sucker, I don't even give a ****. But if a single nother one pops up, I'll be giving Sam's Club a little visit. I get the feeling they'd be happy to exchange.

I don't like that the only sound port is in the front. That's nifty for headphones, but speakers on a desk, I'd like the port to be on the side or back. The whole point of a laptop is to get the cords out of the way.

Also the speakers to me sound particularly crappy. Even my cheapo ancient Toshiba sounds better. They're tinny as all get out and working with the equalizers in winamp or that crappy thing that comes with windows is no use. But somehow it's got 3d sound. Sounds way better with speakers, and I'm hoping to find some USB speakers to plug in the back.

Overall, I love it. The three things I don't love are 1) XP crashing, though this version has some nice security features (for how long they seem secure, ha!), 2) the dead pixel (which in my crazy girl mind adds charm--I ain't perfect neither), and 3) for me the awkward placement of the sound port.

I love the speed. I love the screen. I love the keyboard (but I don't love stretching for the delete key). I love the sound and screen hotkey controls. I love how COOL it runs. I love the price. Before I was thinking of getting the Averatec 6210 at Sam's Club for $1099 and now Micro Center for $999, but I think the Sharp is way better quality, and I'm hot for the screen.

 

hello longdong,
I will be getting this laptop in approx 5 days. if you haven't allready gotten it by then i'll let you know. i personally am very excited to get it.. i too fell in love with it at sams seeing the screen beside the other lcd screens was a standout. if anyone finds a major problem let us know!

 

[ ]I recently bought a Sharp Actius AL27. I have a number of other laptops, and my recent favorite was the Sony Z1RA - that is, until the Sharp came along. To me, the screen, the keyboard and storage were most important. The sharp excels at all of these. The screen is very bright and clear, with only distant competition from some of the new exbright screens hitting the markt rcently. For a 6 pound notbook, the keyboard is OK, slightly ergonomically curved. The DVD is a +-RW, and mine is very quiet. The entire systems runs very cool. Once I was able to get over the white gloss exterior (my daughter liked it - it matched her ipod), it seemed a very good deal at $1277 plus change from Sam's club. In the interest of fairness, the AL27 has some drawbacks. Like everyone else using a built in 802.11g, I felt the system could use a bit more power. However, it did accept the SMC card with external antenna for some outstanding range. Next, construction seems a bit light, certainly much more so than my Sony, Toshiba and the older HP. It was similar to the construction of our Dell laptop. But who knows until one drops it how it will fare. The heavy laptops don't seem to do very well in this test ither, so the light construction may be more of a feel type of thing than fact. Battery life is a bit over 2 hours, which is far less than my Z1RA with the optional $500 battery.

Overall, at $1277, it seems the current value leader. No doubt that others will begin to incorporate better screens in the next year, but if you are looking for a mid to low priced laptop with a great screen and DVD +-RW capability, this is a good bet.

[ ]


visit security1.us

 

I GOT IT! can you feel my excitement, haha. So far so good , well almost.
First things first, i was installing all of my favorite programs. some are iso's of cd's that i have saved on my desktop machine. so, i use a program called daemon tools to mount the images as a virtual drive. All i can say is "DO NOT INSTALL DAEMON TOOLS ON THIS LAPTOP." It crashed to the ground within the first 45 min of owning it, but! it was my fault, it was software that i had loaded. With this mistake though i was able to test the restore feature. It worked great. simply hit ye ol' f10 key on startup, click next about twice and your done!

I'll have to agree with jessabelle's previous post about the speakers being junk. this, i'm afraid, is true. they are awfull. but hey, i wasn't lookin for great sound from my laptop.

The keyboard rocks! it's super easy to type on and the keys feel very good.

THE LCD!. ohhhhhh the lcd. "wear sunglasses during use" should be printed on the box.

I don't particually like the way the hard drive is partitioned into two drives but i'm sure they have their reasons.

I love the color personally, i'm sure it will catch some eyes.

I just used the "direct hd" connection and it worked wonderfully. what it allows you to do is connect a special usb cable from your laptop to another computer and transfer files to the laptop , WHILE IT'S TURNED OFF!. it worked flawlessly and was very fast. i transfered about 6 gb of pictures in less then 12 min. hey, works for me.

I'M HAPPY WITH MY PURCHASE!
Thanks dad.

 

The laptop is nice. The LCD isn't a suprise because Sharp is known for their superior LCDs.

 

UPDATE: I finally got tired of the d*mn red dead pixel and took it back to Sam's to exchange. No problems at all! I don't think the customer service people even know what a dead pixel is, so they didn't give me any crap about it. Sam's is great for the price and the ease of exhange, IMO.

Now I'm just looking for some sweet, mid-priced usb speakers. Even with the ancient hand-me-down NEC speakers, things sound way better.

Cheers.

 

That's good to here that there will be no problems on returns. I was slightly worried about that.

 

I just don't understand why Sharp doesn't market well in the US. It has some of the best notebooks the industry has ever seen (except for IBM; who is the leader in quality) there quality is great, and they have the best screens. I love the work that they put into there notebooks however, the mainly steer towards the higher-end of the notebook industry; I have never seen them produce a notebook under $1,000! However, if I had the money I would go and buy the Actius AL27 it is one of the best notebooks that I have ever seen. And, it offers a lot for the price. However, I just worry about the integrated graphics chip. I've never heard of the company. Does anybody know how well this chip performs? Can it play some basic games? Even so, I still think that the Actius AL27 is a great looking notebook! [ ]

Windows - The operating system that runs the world.

Toshiba - Quality, price, and features!

 

I am thinking about buying the Sharp Actius at Sam's. I have never owned a laptop, though, and I am reading the posts on the Actius. Does anyone have any comments for a person who has never owned a laptop? I was thinking about going with Dell or Gateway because I have bought desktops from both of them. I loved the screen on the Actius, though. Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Margaret

 

Regarding the graphics, while this machine looks great for general use, it won't do higher-end gaming. Doom3 won't even install and sends up a snooty message that this machine isn't good enough. This isn't a gamer's machine for sure.

But my favorite game is Mah Jong, and for that it's excellent. ;-)

Margaret, as for shopping for a laptop, my advice (as only a second-time laptop owner) is to figure out what YOU need based on how YOU will use the machine. Laptops are incredibly diverse these days and range from the superlites for people on the go who have a desktop elsewhere to big fat desktop replacements that are a bit heavy if you really haul them around a lot.

I wanted a desktop replacement that I could do basic web maintenance on (and writing--oh, yeah, forgot my main job in life is to write!) but which takes up less room as I move from place to place and can be taken occasionally to coffee shops. The AL27 is a nice happy medium for me. It's not a gamer's computer, and it's not an ultra-light. But one would be too heavy and the other too small and, pardon the pun, lightweight.

Think about what size screen and quality you'd be comfortable looking at for a long time. Is the keyboard something you can use? Do you like the pointing device? Or does it not matter because you'll be attaching a mouse? Does it have the storage capacity you'll need? What about back up? Do you need to burn CDs or DVDs? Is the processor fast enough to run your favorite apps without crashing? (When I'm working on my webpage, I need Dreamweaver, Word, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and Email running simultaneously, and I don't want to crash and lose data.) And WEIGHT! Any heavier, and I wouldn't want to take this sucker anywhere. My old Toshiba weighted half a pound more, had a crappy screen, and needed mice and zip drives and a wireless card and whatnot to be mildly acceptable, so lugging all of that stuff was a pain. At least with this one, it's just the computer I have to lug around and not any extra crap. By itself it's a piece of cake, but in a briefcase that's already brimming with 70 student papers, it can add to the back ache.

Cheers,
jessabelle

 

nice post jessabelle. those are all important factors to consider when purchasing a laptop. I have had my al27 a little over a month now. I personally think it can't be beat. The all around usefullness and quality of this laptop is amazing. Even my friends with gaming spacific laptops are jealous.

Sharp AL27, Athlon 64 2700+ 60Gb hdd, 512Mb mem, 64Mb vid, superbright lcd. DVD +-/RW. Great choice for business use.

www.pc-proz.com

 

Just thought I'd throw in my 2-cents about the Sharp AL 27. I've had the machine for about 3 weeks now and so far so good. The machine is well built in my opinion. In my past, I have owned an IBM Thinkpad T20, a Dell Inspiron, and an Averatec (ultralight).

Pros:
- Having been through my share of laptops, I must say that the Sharp ranks right up there with the IBM.
- The keyboard is phenomenal - equally as good, if not better, than the IBM's.
- The LCD has a brillant display, and yes, it can sometimes be too bright.
- The machine runs cool - for having a high quality processor, it runs very cool, especially compared to the Dell's.

Cons:
- Loud fan - I don't know if it is just me, but I feel that the fan is sort of loud and could be distracting in lectures (I'll tell you for sure in 2 weeks when classes start)
- Battery Life - the battery life is pitiful - approximately 2 hrs is what is quoted and it is accurate. Don't expect more than 2 hrs. On the upside, even if you run on the battery, the screen brightness does not diminish at all. (perhaps this is why you only get 2hrs...?)

The comments about the speakers are accurate, but then again, as said before, who gets a laptop for the speakers?!

All in all, its a great laptop with brillant style. I imagine that this one will be a long term keeper...but than again..2hr battery life will get to me at some point I'm sure...

 

All of you are making a very powerful argument for the Sharp. I'm impressed. I've been wandering around this forum and also the computer stores, searching for something that will meet my needs as a journo - an almost identical list to Jessabelle's.(for mah-jong, insert dorky solitaire games). So far the only machine that has impressed me from top to bottom is the Toshiba Qosmio - if I could only have a media centre-free version, I'd be thrilled (hmmm...but being a media centre extraordinaire is the whole purpose of this beast, isn't it?)
Sorry to hear that the audio portion of the program is awful. Don't really want to start tacking on speakers and adding to the general clutter. I will take a closer look at the AL, and will wait to see the forthcoming XG series. Thank you all for putting another choice on the table. Gawd, finding a good laptop is hard... Maybe 2005/6 will bring an across-the-board upgrade in screen quality/brightness from all the manufacturers whose displays are in need of a revamp (that'd be most of them)

 

Update:

Retraction:
- First, glad to report the fan is not an issue - the computer runs very quietly in a classroom setting even if you are not using the battery and you have to load a 1meg Adobe file.

Additional Cons:
- Lack of a mute button is no good. I miss having a mute button, but ended up creating a windows shortcut to circumvent the lack of the mute button. It does the job but it would have been nice to have an actual volume control (not a FN+F3/F4)

- While the exterior of the Sharp is very nice, the case is very glossy. This means that you get finger print smudges all over it if you carry it with you a lot. Since it's so glossy, if you look at it in the light, you see a bunch of smudges. Not a big deal, but if you're a neat freak it will start to bug you. Just a superficial complaint, but some info to help people in making a purchasing decision.

 

I simply love this computer!

 

I was wondering I have the averatec 6130hs p4 3ghz ht with ati 9600 64 mb vram and I'm thinking of exchanging it at sams club for the sharp actius al27. Would getting the sharp be a better computer in the long run then the averatec? Would the sharp be able to play games like Knights of the Old republic 2 or command and conquer generals.
-andrew

 

Sharp AL 27----- How can anyone NOT love this pc!! Hard to believe the silly cons listed on here from ...smudges on the glossy finish from your fingers...oh please beats the hell out of battleship grey on my Vaio!!

ALL other will be burning the midnite oil to produce this screen display...AWESOME!!!...and PRICE!!! Sams Club kicks butt at 1198.00

Jim in Va. Beach..

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by jedisolo

 

I bought this sharp and a 5110H model and have had no problems for about 9 months, you all will enjoy it, its a nice unit, but the 5110H runs cooler with the centrino. But thats to be expected. Nothing I have to say about it in a neg way at all. I had to have it when they had it in about 2 weeks after I bought the 5110H model. The screen is remarkable awsome, simply.

You will find that the case will get more firm as time goes buy.

 

I must say that I am quite pleased with my new Sharp Actius AL27. Awesome price at Sams Club. It is much faster than my old Dell P3, and runs much much cooler. I do have a gripe about the end user having to make their own system software backup CDs. And the fact the the software included with the Actius will only allow you to make one CD. Does anyone miss the computer manufacturer providing the system software on CDs? I purchased a Sony Viao laptop (I use the term laptop loosly - its a monster!!) in January, and you had to make the CDs yourself too. Maybe I'm just being old fashioned, but I digress. This is a really nice laptop. It's really nice to have built in wireless, I'm glad to be rid of the "clunker" wireless card! I use my laptop primarily for surfing the net, programming, presentations. I was gonna go with an Averatec just because the price was right, but I am really glad I went with the Sharp!

 

so what's the price on this bad boy?

 

When I purchased it at sams the cost was 1277.00, BUT! I don't see it on sams site anymore and it looks like the prices is around 1400 online.

Sharp AL27, Athlon 64 2700+ 60Gb hdd, 512Mb mem, 64Mb vid, superbright lcd. DVD +-/RW. Great choice for business use.

www.pc-proz.com

 

it was an impulse--sam's club. i went there to see if they still had any averatec notebook pc's in stock. for the last month i had been unable to decide between the 3200 and the 6210. this week it appeared that both were unavailable at 2 different sam's. that left an hp and the glossy white sharp AL27. i came, i looked, i bought the glossy white one. (cost was $1100.)

this, without even once investigating anything about sharp notebooks in general or this one in particular.

online reviews have been somewhat lacking in praise, mostly due to the inferior sound reproduction and the poor graphics speed for intense gaming. similar 'cons' have been noted on this forum.

but most of those who have posted here have seen much to admire and like about the AL27. and when there has been a problem, it seems that it was caused by the user or remedied quickly by a substitution from sam's. which is one reason why i got it there.

so today i looked at the manual, such as it is. haven't yet taken the machine out of the box. i'm a little afraid, as XP os seems a strange beast to someone still using win98 on computers, none of which is newer than 4 yrs. but i thought i needed something newer because one can't get much software or hardware these days that is usable with win98 (even 'se').

reading these posts, i feel a little better about my choice, but if anyone out there who posted here earlier is still reading these posts, i'd appreciate some further reassurance. after weeks or months using this model, are you still happy with your choice ? for myself, i am interested in availing myself of the opportunity to do more with digital photography now than i was able to with the older win98 os.

a couple of questions that anyone can feel free to address:
--sam's offers extended warrantees, for 1 yr ($69) and 3 yrs ($199). i did purchase the 3 yr version, but dont know if that was necessary or advisable. any comments ?
--someone mentioned adding a linux os (9.2), and i wonder why or if others have done so as well.
--someone mentioned looking for reasonably priced usb speakers. did you ever find any that were suitable ?
--can i abandon my '97 ibm 200mhz and my '99 gateway 450mhz desktops ? (don't know who would want them !) they are real large-space occupiers, don't do much beyond word processing and web-surfing anymore. but in the boonies where i live, i have access to dial-up and usually connect at only 26.4. it seems i am giving a home to 2 dinosaurs.
--is it worth upgrading to XP pro ? or wait for this other new windows os that someone mentioned... '64' ?
--i have several win98 software programs that i feel sentimental about, but don't know if they will be usable with XP. anyone know where i can check them out for backward compatability ?
--any suggestion for a good reference manual to use with winXP would be appreciated. i feel as much a newbie with that as i did when i bought my first win95 pc in '97. i tend not to want to disrupt what's running well, or even tweak stuff much. but if something does go wrong, i like to be able to understand a straight-forward approach to remedying things without too much techy info.

i'll appreciate any responses to this posting and thank you for the time you may spend doing so.

 

I still love my sharp! I haven't had one problem out of it. I’ve had it approximately 4 months or more. It's fast and it looks cool. I'm trying to talk my aunt into getting one Yes, I would do away with your old desktops You'll never touch them once you get on this machine. Don't be afraid of xp, it's very rare to crash it and when it does it can more then likely recover. Be brave!

Sharp AL27, Athlon 64 2700+ 60Gb hdd, 512Mb mem, 64Mb vid, superbright lcd. DVD +-/RW. Great choice for business use.

www.pc-proz.com

 

I'm taking a break from moving. The move was one of my rationalizations for bying the AL27. I had a dinky laptop and a dinky desktop, and needed both to do all of my work. The laptop wasn't good enough for editing with Dreamweaver, the desktop was big. But the AL27 more than replaces both. I'm satisfied with it alone. Except it doesn't have a parallel port for my ancient scanner! I mean ancient, so that's fine.

I too was a 98 person. 2000 and other versions had reps for crashing too much. I rather like XP, although I've made a few modifcations, classic looks instead of xp look, minimal popups, etc, but on the whole fine it way more reliable than 98. Performance wize, this sucker blows away my other computers. I'm not a gamer so the graphics are fine for me.

I think I was the one who mentioned getting USB speakers. I've seen several on the internet but my locak MicroCenter doesn't carry them, so I haven't actually purchased any. I like to hear speakers before buying them. I'm using some old NEC speakers that my dad gave me six years ago as surplus for the school he teaches at. The sound great, and I just weave the plug under the keyboard (I have the notebook on a heat reducing riser. Even though this thing runs fairly cool, I figure it can't hurt maintaining the lifespan.

With speakers, it sounds fine. In fact, because of the aforementioned move, I copied all of my CDs to the hardtrive (about 13 gigs for 300 cds). I actually listen to them more through stupid media player than I did as real cds. The DVD drive is great for backing up media. I have a digital camera, and photoshop runs great on the machine. One of the pluses of xp of 98 is the built in picture viewer, so you don't have to open every file to look at them.

I also downloaded the free Picasa from Google. It's awesome, and I highly recommend it.

Months later, I'm still loving my computer. The only thing wrong with it is a tiny nick on the screen, and as you noted, that's my fault. It seems to be holding up well, and after using this superbright screen even flat LCD monitors look muffled and stuffy. I love, love, love this baby!

All best,
jesseca

 

thanks for the postings. your replies are well-taken. at least i will go so far as to take the pc out of the box and turn it on. today or tomorrow.

 

I'm a total dork. I uninstalled WordPerfect, and I've forgotten how to reinstall it. I think system restore only goes back so far--and really I've made tons of changes that I want to keep, so I don't really want to use that anyway. I know it's on that permanently written part of the harddrive that can't be erased, but I just don't remember how to access it. I'm sure it's easy, but it's totally escaping my brain.

Much thanks,
jessabelle

 

Did Sharp give you a CD with the Software/Drivers on it? If you can't find Word Perfect, you might want to try OpenOffice. It is free and you can open/save word, excel, powerpoint, etc documents without losing the formatting.







I was robbed by a sweet little old lady on a motorized cart and I didn't even see it coming.

-Lloyd Christmas


Thinkpad T42:
* 1.8Ghz Pentium M * 1.5GB Memory * 60GB Hitachi 7200RPM * 15" SXGA+ Flexview * MultiBurner * Win 2k *

 

Oh, and I've got word and OpenOffice, but get this: I really love the way Word Perfect lets you format labels. Word, and as best as I can make out with open office, either want you to do one label at a time or a whole page of the same label. I want to do a whole page, but different text for the labels. How frikken hard should that be? OpenOffice was also giving me fits about changing the default headers, etc. That's **** I don't want to have to set up each and every time I use the sucker.

Cheers,
jessabelle

 

No, no CDs at all. Everything is on some secret hidden partition of the hard drive that can't be erased. Or, apparently, found by me. [ ]

 

Well, I just got off the phone with Sharp, and the good news is that they will talk to customers on Sundays. The bad news is the only way to get Word Perfect back is to do a system recovery taking this puppy back to it's out of the box state. Whew! I think I'll see if I can find an illegal copy of WordPerfect 12 on the web. I mean, apparently I own a license, I just can't access the program without losing everything else. And it's not just the data, sure I can burn that easy easy on the DVD, or losing all the other programs I've installed, it's the customizations of everything from Word to Firefox. GRR. Maybe I can backup those customized files as well. GRR. Right about now, I do miss the old fashioned CDs that used to come with laptops. But the long and short of it is, it's probably not worth it just to print out some labels.

 

Well, I've owned this baby for about 6 months now. I must say that the AL27 is a very stable system that will run cool 24/7. I was slightly disapointed that the VIA S3 video card isn't recognized during *some* game installations (namely Doom3 & Final Fantasy 11), But overall this system will run almost any game perfectly with absolutely no lag or slowdown issues if you don't mind setting up the video settings to low in-game. When I first saw this notebook I couldn't believe that it could really be a Desktop Replacement due to it's small size, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I use this notebook as my primary computer in the household, always on, and I just couldn't be more satisfied with it's performance.


And for those of you whom already own an AL27, you should really consider making the final plunge and head over to newegg.com and pick yourself up a 1gb DDR-333 PC-2700 notebook memory module and top your baby off at 1280MB of ram. The performance leap is UNBELIEVABLE for a mere $120 upgrade.

Sharp AL27 | 15" XGA+ Double-Bright | Mobile Athlon 64 2700+ | 1280MB ram | 64meg shared | 60GB HD | DVD±R/RW | 802.11 b/g |

 

ResOGlas,

I saw your post on getting RAM @ newegg, and I would like to know what you got. I called Sharp to get the specs on what type of memory to purchase; there are many to choose from, but I fear I will get the wrong kind. Any help would be greatly apriciated. Thank you.

 

Oh yeah,
Not sure if you all know Sam's Club has online auctions on their website. In the middle of March I picked up this notebook for $844 + tax and shipping ~$902. Great comp, great deal, but insufficient burning software and a few drivers need updating. I also got curious and just installed Windows x64. The computer works, but very few programs are compatible--well I really haven't done anything but install. Every program scrolls slower with the touchpad; I don't have a mouse. I ran AMD CPUInfo and max speed reports at 3800MHz. I can't find any improvements though. Anyone else have better experience? Cheers

 

Just a quick post for AL27 users to find the latest downloads, including wordperfect.
Go to
http://portal.knowledgebase.net/dis...qlL25sBFnYP&cid=2680&cat=&catURL=&r=0.7286951

pick AL27, then drivers. They are all there.

If you don't want to cut and paste the above link, go to sharpsystems.com, select knowledge base, then notebook pcs, then AL27, then drivers.

I hope that this is helpful.