Acer Debuts Powerful Budget Laptops
Acer is giving Intel’s powerful i3 and i5 Core processors a home in a pair of new budget-minded laptops. The 15.6-inch Acer Aspire AS5740 and 17.3-inch Acer Aspire AS7740 will both start at $750 when they ship on Sunday, January 17th. The larger AS7740 comes standard with a 2.14 GhZ Core i3-330M processor, 4GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive (to make use of that large screen), and Windows 7 Home Premium. The smaller AS5740 lacks the Blu-ray drive but packs a wallop with the 2.26 GhZ Core i5-430M processor.
Both feature other niceties like multi-gesture touchpads, built-in webcams, six-cell lithium ion batteries, a slew of ports, and 500GB hard drives. The designs could be sleeker and the battery life won’t be great, but that’s a lot of computer for under $800. Of course, better configurations are available for a bigger price tag as well.
Why does such a solid computer suddenly go for a reasonable price, you ask? Well, the International Consumer Electronics Show just wrapped up. A bunch of hot new configurations were unveiled in Vegas last week, so keep your eyes peeled for deals on powerful new models and cheap old models.