Thread has been dormant for a while, but I come to it, reading jennyh saying that HP make awful laptops.
I don't want to see that, having suffered a most terrible Acer machine (which I type this on) for more than a year, and just as I am intending to upgrade to a 2.7 Ghz HP Pavilion laptop.
The Acer has and AMD Turion dual core and 4 GB DDR2 Ram standard (Acer 5535). Acer have done wonderful things with the 768p HD widescreen (15.6) display - it is really lovely indeed and I would choose the display over any other laptop computer model on any day.
However that won't ever be happening, because the huge shame is that the Acer machine just can't do anything. If I want to marvel at the nice Acer display in video, I will have to do it as if I were looking at low resolution photographs, because at times there is rarely more than one frame per second. I first wondered what was wrong with the machine when I tried Microsoft Word 2007 on it - I have never experienced a slower word processor on a completely fresh and empty dual hard drive machine (but for the system / os data). I wondered if there would be any point in putting more than a few gigabytes on the 250 gb hard drive (222 after system / os data).
There is a lot of data on the 2 hard drives now, but it is so slow often.
I just read an old forum post in AVForums of an Acer latpop being "Epicly slow". And I laughed, because it is a really appropriate word. The epic you'll be watching in 720p HD video on the Acer is the amazing slowness, pausing, shutting down and often 1 frame per 7 seconds. Thankfully there is some use for the display in film terms - and that is that you can appreciate the very good display in watching a DVD disc. But even still, recently it is becoming fraught to switch on and watch a DVD film - jerky, stalling, pausing, delayed, unsynced some times.
I think I will go for the HP, because there is no other 4gb dual core 2.7 ghz option out there at anything near such a low price (around £590 in UK - UK prices are generally substantially higher for laptops anyway). Even in a Walmart clearance, it is unbelievable in UK to be able to buy a 2.2 ghz machine (even if it is Celeron) or a dual core ram machine for less than £200.