Acer aspire as5672WLMi

As far as gaming goes, you're covered. It will be able to play all of those games and on good settings too. The CPU would bottleneck before the graphics card. Personally, I would want a faster processor, but if that's out of your price range then this seems like a good notebook for the tasks you need.

i had the x1400 version and i ran guildwars, css, and bf2 mid - high settings. so the x1600 should not have a problem. Just rememer to give it a fresh install of windows.. and do not use any acer programs.

i just bought that about 2 weeks ago... DEFINETLY get a XP pro disc too it will save you time, cuz the fat32 partitioning on that thing cripples it don't worry about losing anything, after u do a full reformat, everything u need can be obtained off the acer website, it's just they set up 3 partitions on this, beginning of the hdd is PQSERVICE a invisible recovery parition, then Your regular C: and then ACERDATA, it's all fat32 not ntfs, it can be converted using paritions magic and merged, but it still isn't run as optimal as this machine could, i suggest u grab a copy of xp pro as well, or home, whichever you want, but to really get what you expect from this i recommend a reformat, it's not that hard, and i mean, you will see...lol once u run it your gonna be like....uhh where is this dual core power i expected....it's there, it's just masked in a poor recovery system, and somewhat of a brain fart on acer's part to save the 2-10cents it would have cost to press a real recovery disk. but this thing is lovely i will admit... and a reminder, it does get "hot" on the touchpad, so u might wanna throw in a bluetooth mouse too, or a usb mouse, as it has no legacy ports, for ps/2 if people still use ps/2... i play the following on there CS:S, DoD, HL2 (anything on source engine) farcry, rainbow six lockdown, COD 2, act of war: high treason, as well as i run autocad 2007, and 3D Studio Max 8 and Poser 6, (3D modeling applications) and it handles all well, but yea it's a good system. well worth it, and the wiFi cards excell over my desktop linksys, and portable usb motorola, i live on a military base, so i can score signals from the on base internet cafe/lodge...lol do all my torrents on there bandwidth... glossy screen gives it a oohh ahh effect, alotta people just haven't seen a glossy screen and the computer is vista capable as the sticker will say, but i think another gb of ram will be in order to make that real smooth, but that's further down the road anyways..lol but yea you should really grab a xp installation cd if you don't already have one, cuz i believe most people do reformatting and switch to xp pro, from what i have gathered, i wasn't alone in my actions... but yea, if you go with this, even if you have the 1.66ghz like i chosen, it can be switche for the new merom processors later on, which should have less power consumption..20% or so i believe and possibly higher speeds then the yonah's currently out. so mean, you can always go this route now, then come tax return time add a gig and a new cpu...and maybe one those fancy new flash hybrid harddrives. all that and i think the heat problem will not be as serious,

I'd like to 3rd the format suggestion. It's a must.

Assuming you are based in the US, you could easily get it for less than $1250US. I don't live in the US, and I got it shipped to me for less than that amount.

If I was to clean install with XP Pro, on the setup screen, do I just delete all of the partitions and then install XP? Not very computer literate, but I'm learning Thanks.

The Aspire 5672 seems like the best price/performance ratio that Acer offers right now. The only alternative I could find was this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834227002

I know it's $150 more than your top price but it really has some great features for that price. The HD is 20 GB smaller though. But it has a 2 GHz CPU instead of 1.66 and 256 MB Video Memory instead of 128. The decision is yours I just thought I'd post an alternative.

if you delete all partitions, you'll lose the PQservice partition forever. It's on the beginning of C:

You can delete D: and recreate it into multiple partitions from the XP install disc and also convert fat32 on C to ntfs during format choices.

Formatting C: does not disrupt the PQS partition, but deleting it does. Depends if you think you'll ever want to revert to the orginal install or not. I know on some service issues, they'd want you to restore the factory OS before servicing your computer, to rule out software problems. While under warranty it's best to keep the ability to restore to factory.

Thanks. Does the PQservice really hinder the computers potential? I'd like to get the processes and the memory usage down. so far i have 49 processes running, and the mem usage is around 370 mb.

I've made two backup discs using the acer software. I made the "backup disc1" and the application cd which is nice because it has all the drivers on it, so i don't have to download them from the acer website. Im a little confused on what erecovery actually backs up. When I go to burn an image to disc using erecovery, i get two options: 1. Factory Default Image, and 2. Application CD.

So, if I choose option one, what is it actually backing up? Is the pqservice partition in there? Thanks!

i think the pqservice hinders the hdd access time, and 49 processes is still kinda high, i stay around 30 with internet explorer windows open and virusscan running, bluetooth,etc. and yea it's simple, to format and reinstall, first u will have to go to bios and change it so the cd rom boots first then the hdd, then reboot, with your xp disc in, and yea go thru delete all paritions, then create a new one, and format with ntfs. then just load ur necessary drivers. it's not that hard.

if you want in my opinion "optimal" performance out of your machine, they way acer set up this system, although they might have had the best intentions, to make things convenient and simple, they semi crippled the performance of the machine, if you have a retail copy of Xp, then it doesn't matter, the PQSERVICE parition is nothing more then a image of xp, and all the factory installs, it's kinda divided among there and the backup recovery disk you intially make when you first boot up, but i mean even if you merge your hdd, and leave pqservice, that parition is located on the front of the hdd, which (i know this is a lame metaphor) is kinda like having a box of socks, and you want the red pair(particular data), u gotta dig to the bottom of the box, instead of pulling it from the front... and at the very least a user should convert there other fat32 paritions to ntfs, as there are alotta apps that check and require ntfs due to it's ability to handle higher hdd sizes... but yea, once it's all gone it's all gone.. that should be kept in mind, i don't argue that, it's just a fresh install really is the best route, and the drivers and everything are easily downloaded off the acersupport website,

Get a good imager (Acronis, Ghost, the one from www.terabyteunlimited, whatever) and image the whole drive to an external USB HD of a couple of DVD.
Test if you can mount that image using the CD of your imager, and if you can put back a partition and MBR.

After that you are reasonably safe that you can actually restore the PQService (including MBR), just in case

Personally I don't see the need for fresh installs and reformatting. It doesn't deliver added value (speed) compared to selectively uninstalling the stuff you don't want.

the same with conversion to NTFS. FAT32 is actually faster. You would only need NTFS for either 4Gb+ file sizes (e.g. copying DVDs) or security. See help file on NTFS and the CONVERT command.

PQservice does NOT slow down your system, though the eRecovery tool may do so when converting to NTFS. But you can uninstall this (and you probably need to uninstall this if you convert your D-drive to NTFS.

Well that's the most important non-sense I could unpcik from the above.

If you still go for a fresh install (just for the fun of it) make sure you have all the drivers incuding the ones that are NOT on acer's website, and make sure you understand in which order to install these drivers.


hth

Drio