Acer or HP

thread moved.

acer

have you looked at the HP dv1000? i was in the same boat you are, and i ended up getting it. it doesn't have 5 hours of battery life though, but it's got everything else you want. if you have any questions let me know

i'm gona start sounding like a broken record, but check out the acer aspire 2012 wlmi. For a little over $1200 you get a centrino notebook with a banias CPU running at 1.5 GHz (don't let the 1meg vs the dothan's 2 megs of cache worry you. It runs great, and the benchmarks show dothan maybe gives a 5% boost. Also, some people on this forum have said that the newer batches of the 2012 include a 1.5 dothan, so you might get lucky). It also has Wifi (b/g), an ATI 9700 video card, 512 ram, 60gb hd, 15in widescreen that looks great, dvd burner, SD/memory stick/smartcard reader, IR, and gets great battery life. 4.5- 5 hours without wifi on. I think I might've got around 4ish with wifi on and decent use. It looks great, and as far as portability goes, it weighs around 6.5 pounds, and it's pretty slim too. You can also get an internal bluetooth module and install it yourself. Checkout one of my other threads to show how to do this.

I actually had the HP zt3000 (x1000) before the acer 2012, and while I really was impressed with its design, I ended up returning it because HP lied about the ATI videocard, which they said was a 9200, even though it was a 9000. Anyways, I'd go for the Acer because I've looked over the pricing for HP quite a bit with their custom models, and for what you get with the acer 2012, you'd end up paying $1500- $1700 for the HP, and that doesn't even include the 9700 radeon (which they don't have for the zt3000 series). I know you said gaming is for desktops, and that's fine, but if you are interested, this thing plays doom 3 and counter strike source at 1024 (medium detail). Overall it's just a really great bargain when you consider you get a dvd burner and a great graphics card for $300 - $500 less then HP. As for reliability, I've had mine for 6 months now and it's been great. There are a decent number of 2012 users on thsi forum too, so you can get help if you need it.

i had a compaq and an acer
i would go with acer all the way

I have both an HP (my desktop) and an Acer (my current laptop). I would go with Acer for just I thing and that is becuase I dont have to worry about having all that junk installed on it (like my HP) plus HP also has a program (will it had 1 when I bought it 1 and a half years ago) called "HP CENTER". It is the puriest BS in the world. If you even try to unistall it (which I remember Ad-Aware did becuase it really is classified as type of spyware) My computer wouldnt even get on the internet. For me just becuase of that reason I chose Acer.

http://www.vgln.com/features/EpAllAAAAEzahybAZP.shtml

wrote a small review on it

check pricegrabber.com, froogle.com, and pricewatch.com

Also newegg.com may have them in stock. They are getting harder to find. Perhaps acer is coming out with something new. I havn't had to return it/get help, so I dunno how their help is. I would guess like most tech support, you are better off getting it here ;-) I would say that it has been very reliable so far, so that is a good start in my book

mmm, I don't think so. No benchmarks to prove it, but my batterylife is acceptable with the 9700.

looks good except the resolution is the killer. 1024 native resolution for a 15inch notebook???? what was acer thinking?

yeah watch out for that. I'd call to confirm AND check their return policy to be safe. The acer 2012 actually had two models the wcmi and wlmi, with the wcmi being integrated intel graphics and the wlmi being the 9700. Sounds like one of the two made a labeling error.