Acer Aspire M5-481PT-6488 user reviews

Pros Back lit keyboard
Win 8 OS
Design

Cons Patience.
If your coming form win 7 you should be OK but if your coming from WinXP take a class have the associate show you a few things before going home

Summary No need to fear People the next great OS is here. Look it is different and this can be scary and unnerving to some. Just be patient. If you can get your way around windows 7 and your smart phone Iphone 5,android or windows phone then you can tackle this OS. I can do everything I was doing on win 7 and do everything I was doing on my phone minus make phone calls and text. I don't need to grab my phone to play games most games I play are in the win 8 store. so My phone sits until it rings or I receive a text no need to work on both my phone and laptop I can do most on the laptop now. switching between desktop mode and tablet mode is easy. People I am a computer tech and I was getting impatient at first, but I took a deep breath and took my time. I learned the OS the basics and then I was off and running. My wife is a basic computer user and she had no issues. Win 8 is truly a Good OS, gives you many choices of how you use your laptop. Your not just stuck in one mode of doing things. Don't listen to the fan-boys. Try it and learn it and I promise you won't go back. And so what there is no start button SO WHAT!

Pros Fast and powerful, touch screen, thin and light.

Cons Touchpad is a bit hard to use at first (I use a bluetooth mouse, so that's a non-issue anyway).

Summary This is excellent laptop, especially for business users. It handles my memory hogging programs extremely well and has everything you'd want in an ultrabook and more - fast processor, thin and light, and full featured (including a touch screen and a CD/DVD drive). I love this machine!

Pros Fast
Well made/solid
Looks nice
DVD player in an ultrabook
6GB RAM

Cons Colors are washed and reproduction isn't great
Touchpad can be finicky but you can shut it off

Summary I bought this to replace a 3-4 year old Sony. I am pretty tech-savvy but I don't need an annual upgrade!

Look, this isn't a Mac and it's not supposed to be. It's also not a high end, expensive unit and shouldn't be graded as such. The unit runs around $699 at Best Buy and for the price, you get quite a bit: 500GB of storage along with a small SSD to keep the thing fast. A DVD player/burner is included. You get 6GB of ram which is more than most others. You get a decently responsive touch screen to run Windows 8.

The only bad thing I can find is that the color reproduction really isn't good and the colors are washed. This is not the best laptop for photographers or movie buffs but the screen works and I've seen worse. The resolution is not the best either but for the most part, it beats my 3 y/o Sony Vaio.

All in all, if you want some decent specs along with function in a 14" laptop that looks pretty sharp and has some old school flair, this is probably your machine. I looked around to find a better screen and at this price point, you can't really get one in an ultrabook type laptop.

I'm happy with mine.

Pros Light, thin, great overall design, descent speed.

Cons Mediocre screen resolution, extremely unreliable and crashes constantly. Very buggy out of the box.

Summary Purchased this laptop at Best Buy in January. First, the DVD drive didn't work. It would not read any DVDs. I called tech support and was instructed to delete and update the drive, which fixed the problem. 2 days later the DVD drive once again failed to recognize any DVDs. I called tech support and repeated the steps again. In late February, the computer started to crash spontaneously at random intervals, multiple times a day. It displayed the dreaded blue screen with the error Kernel_Data_Inpage_error. I called tech support and they instructed me to do a "refresh", but didn't warn me that it would erase ALL software. Files were retained, but the software was gone. After spending two days uploading the software again and setting up e-mail, printer drivers, applications, etc, the blue screen appeared again. I called tech support yet again, and they finally agreed it was a hardware error and asked that I sent back the computer for a hardware test. This takes 7-10 days during which time no replacement is given. Also, the computer is reset to factory settings so all software is once again deleted.

I have owned an HP, Toshiba, and IBM. Never have I experienced so many issues with a new laptop.