college student getting a laptop (again)

[natelxxxviii]

hi!
i'm about to start my freshman year at indiana, and i'm almost definitely going into piano performance and theoretical math. i'm looking for a laptop to use, and i came across the Acer Aspire AS5003WLMi-XPH Notebook:
15.4" screen, 1GB DDR RAM installed (2 GB max), xp home (i think), AMD turion 64 mobile processor, DVD+-RW, 1.8GHz processor speed, 3.5 hours battery life (i'm thinking that's idle), 1280x800 screen, 1 year warranty, all for around $800.
i mentioned the name acer to my office mate and he said "no way-- just get a dell." but, this seems like a good buy. is this a good deal, or should i stay away from the company?
thanks!
-nate

[rogvalcox]

In my opinion, Dell has seemed to howash a lot of peoples minds!! I'm not saying I wouldn't own a Dell laptop, but...Acer is fine and you will pay more for a dell with those specs!!

And yes...if I had $800.00 to blow on a laptop, I would consider what you just posted about!!

Roger

[DavidGP]

I'd go with Roger too, ACER are a very good brand, I guess they have to be with being the official supplier of hardware to Ferrari, that company wouldnt just pick any old brand!!!

Specs look great for the $$$$s I would however be tempted at your will no doubt be doing alot of number crunching to install the max RAM of 2gb at some point, but the Turion64s are good mobile CPUs

[rogvalcox]

Hence... the Acer Ferrari notebooks!!

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=...oogle&ct=title

Roger

[natelxxxviii]

thanks for your help guys! i'm probably not going to need to use the maximum capacity for memory-- 1gb should be fine. i do believe that i'm gonna get this one :D
-nate

[natelxxxviii]

...or am i?
i was really hoping to get a tablet pc until i saw their cost (i was hoping for something $1000 or less). but in my search i actually found an inexpensive tablet pc-- just shy of a thousand bucks! it's the acer c312xmi, although there are three things about it that are sort of turnoffs in comparison to the 5003wlmi-xph: a pentium-m processor (instead of turion 64 mobile), 512 mb ram, and 4200 rpm for an 80 gig hard drive. now, the tablet *might* come with a gig of ram-- the specs were conflicting for this part, so i sent the retailer an email-- but i'm just not sure. also, is 4200 rpm <i>that</i> bad? would it just make files load a little slowly?
thanks again!
-nate