Would you buy the Acer 1712?

The price going to be more expensive than going with something like an Asus or Compal, but overall you're probably getting a higher quality machine. I have owned an Acer (desktop) and did extensive research on Acer recently (I was interested in Ferrari 3200 - the only thing that turned me off was the RAM and HDD speed) - and what I can tell you from it is that the consensus is that Acer makes a very solid machine. (Plus they're one of the only computer companies that actually manufactures their own systems).

If you're not carrying it and not running on battery, then the weight and the 1 hour battery life won't bother you.

For only $1280, if you can deal with carrying around 15 pounds, its a steal.

Sorry, I got the 1711 and 1712 confused. Newegg sells the Acer 1711 for $1280.

Sorry about that.

Would you buy a bag of house bricks?

As you can tell from my sig, I have the Acer Aspire 1710 series. It is an absolute incredible system with the biggest storage options and the biggest/highest-quality standard aspect ratio LCD on the market in a notebook. The LCD is incredible since it is essentially a desktop LCD (450:1 contrast ratio, 16ms response time, 4 tube lighting - brightest LCD I have ever seen). You also get one of the highest performing disk subsystems (1712 come standard with a Seagate Barracuda 120GB), especially if you upgrade the hard disk since you can have a 250GB performance desktop hard disk (a la Western Digital Caviar SE).

As stated, it is a monster and weighs approximately 16 pounds with the battery installed.

In summary, it is a great and unique system. By using desktop components for CPU, LCD, memory, and hard disk, you are getting a much faster system for a significantly lower price. The only tradeoff is the extreme weight, but it does make the system feel very sturdy in regards to build quality. All the tank notebooks feel that way (my previous Sager NP8890)

If i had no need for battery life, hell yes! either that or carry an SFF machine around with me.

16 pounds? whoh....that's like carrying two normal laptops lol..

edit: or almost 3 ferrari/compals...

i was at a local computer store yesterday (micro center) on long island, and I cannot imagine carrying the acer, it is ginormous, but if you dont have to carry it then there should be no problems.

Hi all,

Well, after an excruciatingly long period of research and a panic-attack inducing purchase-decision I finally got my 1712 a couple of days ago.

The build-quality and the overall "feel" is very solid and robust, no poorly assembled cheap plastic anywhere.
The screen is really nice, bright and vivid, it doesn't have the dull "smogged" look frequently seen on laptop LCDs. No dead pixels (at least none noticed so far).
Also, the viewable area is pretty much exactly the same as my 19 inch CRT monitor right next to it has... cool.

Generally it feels really fast, tight and no-nonsense.

My whole ownership-experience started with a major "oh sh*t" moment, since I managed to destroy the entire harddrive about 20 minutes after I got the thing: PartitionMagic7 failed on me in the middle of repartitioning (apparently it has trouble handling 120+ gig drives... oops, how about an advance warning or something next time, for crying out loud?!?! ) leaving a huge non-bootable mess behind.
I ended up doing a full from-scratch partitioning and install using my existing copy of WinXP, and essentiall setup-files downloaded from AcerFTP... it actually ended up well, since everything works perfectly now and I had full control over what got installed (I find the growing trend of including "recovery disks" instead of full operating systems / system files / drivers pretty disturbing...).

However... now let's see some other stuff.
I know several people on this forum claimed that the machine has virtually no heating-up issues at all.
Well, I played a round of WarcraftIII last night, and noticeable heat was generated: the power-button area and the lower frame of the screen got hottest, and even the palmrest got warm.
Of course everything is relative, and iIt wasn't anything crazy (e.g. the zd7000, which seems to be in constant scorching plasma-mode even if it's only idling) but it was present nevertheless. Same thing with the fan-noise, which inevitably follows heat...

Anyway, despite all that it seems like an impressive machine overall, and I'll be back if something worth posting comes up.

Word.