November 14, 2010 at 13:53eMachines E732G: the same, but cheaper
There is nothing more interesting than writing reviews of the most-most powerful pieces of iron. And reading about them is usually also very entertaining. But when it comes to buying, you, all well-read, think about real financial opportunities and take the simpler option. It’s far from the fact that it will turn out to be worse (at least within the framework of the tasks actually solved on it), but cheaper - no doubt.
A similar approach works when choosing anything from video cards to winter shoes. And, what is the most annoying, reviews of flagships are a dime a dozen, but one can rarely read about sensible middle peasants. Having recently taken care of buying a laptop for my wife, I decided to talk about the winner of the “tender” eMachines E732G, and at the same time about general approaches to choosing a home mobile computer.
To date, the wife of the Acer TravelMate 3022, purchased four years ago. For his rather respectable age by computer standards, he survived not bad: he didn’t peel off, all the “native” parts were in place, he never asked for repair. There are two reasons why I had to think about a replacement. The first is due to the fact that in the last year and a half the laptop has been subjected to daily curiosity from the side of a small child, and for this reason it lost keys, got powerful pokes, was left without rubber legs, and once even crashed hard from the table. The keys returned to their place, the rubber legs - yes, I would have been joking with them, but there hadn’t been any cracks from falling, but a small speck appeared on the screen in the lower right corner. That is, you can use it, but there remains some sense of shabby. The second reason is more serious: the increased capacity battery with which the laptop was used from the very beginning actually ordered a long life - instead of four hours, it began to drag for forty minutes. And the regular one keeps the hour from strength, which is frankly not enough. You might think that when using inside the apartment, more is not necessary, but this is not so: if the laptop is in the nursery, the connected power cord increases the risk of flying by half an order of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. in fact, she ordered a long life - instead of four hours, she began to drag for forty minutes. And the regular one keeps the hour from strength, which is frankly not enough. You might think that when using inside the apartment, more is not necessary, but this is not so: if the laptop is in the nursery, the connected power cord increases the risk of flying by half an order of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. in fact, she ordered a long life - instead of four hours, she began to drag for forty minutes. And the regular one keeps the hour from strength, which is frankly not enough. You might think that when using inside the apartment, more is not necessary, but this is not so: if the laptop is in the nursery, the connected power cord increases the risk of flying by half an order of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. a connected power cord increases the risk of flying to the floor by orders of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. a connected power cord increases the risk of flying to the floor by orders of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come.
По виду сразу и не скажешь, что аппарату четыре года
От ноутбука мне требовалось следующее:
— Время автономной работы не менее трех часов
— Современный и как можно менее «обрезанный» двухъядерный процессор (дешевые серии CPU по скорости-то нормальные, а вот возможности по энергосбережению у них минимальны. Плохо влияет на реализацию первого требования)
— Как можно бОльшая диагональ экрана при разумном весе (чтобы смотреть с некоторого расстояния, не прищуриваясь)
— Поддержка 802.11n (у меня домашняя сеть давно на этом стандарте, очень удобно смотреть кино и мультфильмы в HD с NAS по воздуху, не копируя на жесткий диск)
- A convenient keyboard with a minimum of additional buttons that children just love to press, cutting down the sound and opening twenty player windows.
- The price is within 25,000 rubles. Not because I'm very greedy - it’s just that the child’s enthusiasm is growing day by day, and if something bad happens with a laptop, it should not be too sorry. Addition to this paragraph is the case as less as possible soiled and at the same time resistant to external influences.
I will say right away: I immediately began to search among Acer laptops. It's not about religious preferences, no. I also respect the other brands, but three Acer's live at home, and everyone likes them. I already mentioned one, the second is the Acer D250 netbook, which already circled a good half of the globe with me and my wife, and the third is a purely desktop Packard Bell LJ65 with a 17-inch screen, on which I usually work and play something not very heavy . Don’t pay attention to the name of Packard Bell: this is the same Acer, only with a more “expensive” design. I emphasize once again: quite worthy models are also produced under other brands, but so far Acer will not let me down - I do not want to look for good from good. At least at my own expense :) I don’t think I die for the battery after four years: for most of my friends, the batteries gave oak even earlier.
Having reviewed several options with a diagonal of 13 to 15 inches, he noted that the more - the cheaper. The options on the Core i5 / i7 were rejected - a little expensive, and, given the tasks, not very useful. I decided to focus on laptops with Core i3, which turned out to be relatively few. In fact, in the trusted company there were only two Aspire, 5741 and 5742, differing in the frequency of the processor and the type of video card (also an important nuance: you can want anything, but if the object of desire is brought in at best in two weeks ...). After thinking, I stopped at the Acer Aspire 5742G-373G32Mikk for 24,500 rubles (it is worth emphasizing that in the two weeks that have passed since the upgrade, laptop prices in Moscow fell slightly - apparently, sellers exhaled about the sharp ruble exchange rate and ceased to be safe). A bunch of 32nm seemed very pretty (read, a cold and long-playing) Core i3-370 processor (2.4 GHz), a 15.6-inch screen (1366x768), 3 GB of memory, a 320 GB hard drive and a discrete Radeon Mobile 5470 adapter. The latter seems to be not very important, because playing on a laptop no one was going to, but looking at how the GPU has recently been used even to accelerate web surfing, I decided it wouldn't hurt. The keyboard is a sight for sore eyes, curb weight 2.6 kg.
I was really going to take it, but then the knowledgeable guys advised me to look at eMachines laptops. At first I was indignant: yes, eMachines is also an Acer brand, but what was sold under it very much resembled the fruit of a love of a grape box with an Ikea tool box. My wife, of course, is unpretentious, like many immigrants from Zamkadia (I will clarify - I myself am such), but not so much! However, upon closer inspection, it turned out that the exterior of eMachines noticeably straightened. Of course, I am still a connoisseur, but it seems not a shame to show such a woman.
Left Acer, Right eMachines
I was surprised by something else: in the eMachines line I found a total clone of the Aspire 5742G, but 10 percent cheaper! His name is E732G-373G32Mnkk, and the difference, in fact, is only in the logo on the top cover and the location of the card reader. The rest are twins, but the price is no longer 24,500, but 22,000. Being a suspicious guy, he began to look for a catch. Maybe less warranty? No, both there and there for 1 year. Service centers are the same. Can it be done on a night shift by tired Chinese for half the salary? Yes, it seems to look no less solid. The keyboard is one-on-one ... I thought, thought, and took eMachines like that. I think that even an inveterate macrophile would be led to a 10% discount because a peach or a melon is painted on the lid of the "macbook" instead of an apple. In this case, the difference is of such a scale.
At home, before giving the unit into the tenacious hands of his wife and son, he tinkered a bit with him. I was very pleased that the pre-installed Windows 7 ("Home Basic", but immediately 64-bit) was not littered with pseudo-useful software. In fact, they only had to demolish Norton Internet Security, which I didn’t really like, and there wasn’t much more, except for a few pre-installed arcades.
When connecting to the network, there was a discrepancy with the declared characteristics: on the price tag it was written that Ethernet is 100-megabit here, in fact - gigabit, as in the Aspire 5742G. I thought they would also be “tricked" with the wireless, but no, the Atheros adapter only supports 802.11g. Well, nothing, I came to terms with this drawback in the store, because a miniPCI adapter with n support can be found for 800 rubles. I’ll change it soon.
The location of the Ethernet port is inconvenient. It reassures that nobody is going to use it.
He launched the built-in Windows puzomerka and, frankly, a little sad. I thought my Packard Bell was a pretty powerful laptop, but the average eMachines does it at one time.
Above are Packard Bell indicators, below are eMachines
Ok - the processor, but even the video card in game tests is faster than my GeForce GT130M, where the memory bus is twice as wide and the memory itself is twice as large. It is clear that the chip released a year later (I'm talking about Radeon) and made using more advanced technology cannot be slower. But still - sad.
And I was really bored when I launched the benchmark built into WinRar: Core Core i3-370 from eMachines squeezed out almost twice as much against Core 2 Duo: 1567 points instead of 800. Obviously, an additional 300 megahertz (my Core 2 Duo T6500 runs at a frequency 2.1 GHz) do not give such an increase - here both the improved architecture and the presence of Hyper-Threading technology make themselves felt. In general, it turns out that the most powerful laptop in the family is now not mine.
Well, at least the presence of a government test station with Core i7-965 Extreme Edition allows you to maintain respect for yourself.
Without load, the laptop is almost silent, under load, in general, is also not a screamer. The cooling system removes hot air from the right side, and the iron inside is not very hot - at least the knees are not hot at all. The processor and video chip frequencies are thoroughly reset: Core i3 instead of 2.4 GHz in Word + ICQ mode drives itself up to 900 MHz, and GPU up to 175 MHz instead of 750. From a standard 6-cell battery, the laptop in surfing mode lives a little less than four hours. Cinema in SD makes it run out of breath after three and a half hours, and HD - after two. It is quite acceptable.
The brightness margin of the screen is simply monstrous, immediately put it at half brightness, and this is quite enough. Built-in speakers from the sky do not grab stars - the usual ones are loud. 3 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, card reader, DVD cutter - everything is in place.
I am far from considering the eMachines E732G the best laptop in the world - of course, there is more beautiful and faster. I will not even venture to claim that it is the cheapest in its class, although I only saw a lower price for the options on the AMD Athlon II Dual-Core with a frequency of 2.1-22 GHz. But this is an unambiguously sensible workhorse with decent performance, without weird quacks and, it seems, not without grace.
When I wrote this post, I suddenly discovered that these Linux laptops appeared everywhere instead of Windows 7 HB, and even cheaper - from 19,500 rubles. Two weeks ago, I saw this only in one online store, and they said that it was not available. Of course, I convince myself that I saved a lot of time on installing the OS and drivers, but, on the other hand, saving 5000 rubles instead of 2500 is also a passion that is both pleasant and useful. Well, who knew?
But now I can calmly switch to thinking about upgrading my work laptop, the single-core processor of which is already plainly unable to cope even with web pages. If there will be what to write based on the results, I will certainly do it.
A similar approach works when choosing anything from video cards to winter shoes. And, what is the most annoying, reviews of flagships are a dime a dozen, but one can rarely read about sensible middle peasants. Having recently taken care of buying a laptop for my wife, I decided to talk about the winner of the “tender” eMachines E732G, and at the same time about general approaches to choosing a home mobile computer.
To date, the wife of the Acer TravelMate 3022, purchased four years ago. For his rather respectable age by computer standards, he survived not bad: he didn’t peel off, all the “native” parts were in place, he never asked for repair. There are two reasons why I had to think about a replacement. The first is due to the fact that in the last year and a half the laptop has been subjected to daily curiosity from the side of a small child, and for this reason it lost keys, got powerful pokes, was left without rubber legs, and once even crashed hard from the table. The keys returned to their place, the rubber legs - yes, I would have been joking with them, but there hadn’t been any cracks from falling, but a small speck appeared on the screen in the lower right corner. That is, you can use it, but there remains some sense of shabby. The second reason is more serious: the increased capacity battery with which the laptop was used from the very beginning actually ordered a long life - instead of four hours, it began to drag for forty minutes. And the regular one keeps the hour from strength, which is frankly not enough. You might think that when using inside the apartment, more is not necessary, but this is not so: if the laptop is in the nursery, the connected power cord increases the risk of flying by half an order of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. in fact, she ordered a long life - instead of four hours, she began to drag for forty minutes. And the regular one keeps the hour from strength, which is frankly not enough. You might think that when using inside the apartment, more is not necessary, but this is not so: if the laptop is in the nursery, the connected power cord increases the risk of flying by half an order of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. in fact, she ordered a long life - instead of four hours, she began to drag for forty minutes. And the regular one keeps the hour from strength, which is frankly not enough. You might think that when using inside the apartment, more is not necessary, but this is not so: if the laptop is in the nursery, the connected power cord increases the risk of flying by half an order of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. a connected power cord increases the risk of flying to the floor by orders of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come. a connected power cord increases the risk of flying to the floor by orders of magnitude. Therefore, three hours is simply necessary - for cartoons and mother’s surfing, while the child pretends that he is carefully falling asleep. And better - more. Of course, I tried to buy a new high-capacity battery, but due to the antiquity and low popularity of the model, I could not find one. After that I decided - the time has come.
По виду сразу и не скажешь, что аппарату четыре года
От ноутбука мне требовалось следующее:
— Время автономной работы не менее трех часов
— Современный и как можно менее «обрезанный» двухъядерный процессор (дешевые серии CPU по скорости-то нормальные, а вот возможности по энергосбережению у них минимальны. Плохо влияет на реализацию первого требования)
— Как можно бОльшая диагональ экрана при разумном весе (чтобы смотреть с некоторого расстояния, не прищуриваясь)
— Поддержка 802.11n (у меня домашняя сеть давно на этом стандарте, очень удобно смотреть кино и мультфильмы в HD с NAS по воздуху, не копируя на жесткий диск)
- A convenient keyboard with a minimum of additional buttons that children just love to press, cutting down the sound and opening twenty player windows.
- The price is within 25,000 rubles. Not because I'm very greedy - it’s just that the child’s enthusiasm is growing day by day, and if something bad happens with a laptop, it should not be too sorry. Addition to this paragraph is the case as less as possible soiled and at the same time resistant to external influences.
I will say right away: I immediately began to search among Acer laptops. It's not about religious preferences, no. I also respect the other brands, but three Acer's live at home, and everyone likes them. I already mentioned one, the second is the Acer D250 netbook, which already circled a good half of the globe with me and my wife, and the third is a purely desktop Packard Bell LJ65 with a 17-inch screen, on which I usually work and play something not very heavy . Don’t pay attention to the name of Packard Bell: this is the same Acer, only with a more “expensive” design. I emphasize once again: quite worthy models are also produced under other brands, but so far Acer will not let me down - I do not want to look for good from good. At least at my own expense :) I don’t think I die for the battery after four years: for most of my friends, the batteries gave oak even earlier.
Having reviewed several options with a diagonal of 13 to 15 inches, he noted that the more - the cheaper. The options on the Core i5 / i7 were rejected - a little expensive, and, given the tasks, not very useful. I decided to focus on laptops with Core i3, which turned out to be relatively few. In fact, in the trusted company there were only two Aspire, 5741 and 5742, differing in the frequency of the processor and the type of video card (also an important nuance: you can want anything, but if the object of desire is brought in at best in two weeks ...). After thinking, I stopped at the Acer Aspire 5742G-373G32Mikk for 24,500 rubles (it is worth emphasizing that in the two weeks that have passed since the upgrade, laptop prices in Moscow fell slightly - apparently, sellers exhaled about the sharp ruble exchange rate and ceased to be safe). A bunch of 32nm seemed very pretty (read, a cold and long-playing) Core i3-370 processor (2.4 GHz), a 15.6-inch screen (1366x768), 3 GB of memory, a 320 GB hard drive and a discrete Radeon Mobile 5470 adapter. The latter seems to be not very important, because playing on a laptop no one was going to, but looking at how the GPU has recently been used even to accelerate web surfing, I decided it wouldn't hurt. The keyboard is a sight for sore eyes, curb weight 2.6 kg.
I was really going to take it, but then the knowledgeable guys advised me to look at eMachines laptops. At first I was indignant: yes, eMachines is also an Acer brand, but what was sold under it very much resembled the fruit of a love of a grape box with an Ikea tool box. My wife, of course, is unpretentious, like many immigrants from Zamkadia (I will clarify - I myself am such), but not so much! However, upon closer inspection, it turned out that the exterior of eMachines noticeably straightened. Of course, I am still a connoisseur, but it seems not a shame to show such a woman.
Left Acer, Right eMachines
I was surprised by something else: in the eMachines line I found a total clone of the Aspire 5742G, but 10 percent cheaper! His name is E732G-373G32Mnkk, and the difference, in fact, is only in the logo on the top cover and the location of the card reader. The rest are twins, but the price is no longer 24,500, but 22,000. Being a suspicious guy, he began to look for a catch. Maybe less warranty? No, both there and there for 1 year. Service centers are the same. Can it be done on a night shift by tired Chinese for half the salary? Yes, it seems to look no less solid. The keyboard is one-on-one ... I thought, thought, and took eMachines like that. I think that even an inveterate macrophile would be led to a 10% discount because a peach or a melon is painted on the lid of the "macbook" instead of an apple. In this case, the difference is of such a scale.
At home, before giving the unit into the tenacious hands of his wife and son, he tinkered a bit with him. I was very pleased that the pre-installed Windows 7 ("Home Basic", but immediately 64-bit) was not littered with pseudo-useful software. In fact, they only had to demolish Norton Internet Security, which I didn’t really like, and there wasn’t much more, except for a few pre-installed arcades.
When connecting to the network, there was a discrepancy with the declared characteristics: on the price tag it was written that Ethernet is 100-megabit here, in fact - gigabit, as in the Aspire 5742G. I thought they would also be “tricked" with the wireless, but no, the Atheros adapter only supports 802.11g. Well, nothing, I came to terms with this drawback in the store, because a miniPCI adapter with n support can be found for 800 rubles. I’ll change it soon.
The location of the Ethernet port is inconvenient. It reassures that nobody is going to use it.
He launched the built-in Windows puzomerka and, frankly, a little sad. I thought my Packard Bell was a pretty powerful laptop, but the average eMachines does it at one time.
Above are Packard Bell indicators, below are eMachines
Ok - the processor, but even the video card in game tests is faster than my GeForce GT130M, where the memory bus is twice as wide and the memory itself is twice as large. It is clear that the chip released a year later (I'm talking about Radeon) and made using more advanced technology cannot be slower. But still - sad.
And I was really bored when I launched the benchmark built into WinRar: Core Core i3-370 from eMachines squeezed out almost twice as much against Core 2 Duo: 1567 points instead of 800. Obviously, an additional 300 megahertz (my Core 2 Duo T6500 runs at a frequency 2.1 GHz) do not give such an increase - here both the improved architecture and the presence of Hyper-Threading technology make themselves felt. In general, it turns out that the most powerful laptop in the family is now not mine.
Well, at least the presence of a government test station with Core i7-965 Extreme Edition allows you to maintain respect for yourself.
Without load, the laptop is almost silent, under load, in general, is also not a screamer. The cooling system removes hot air from the right side, and the iron inside is not very hot - at least the knees are not hot at all. The processor and video chip frequencies are thoroughly reset: Core i3 instead of 2.4 GHz in Word + ICQ mode drives itself up to 900 MHz, and GPU up to 175 MHz instead of 750. From a standard 6-cell battery, the laptop in surfing mode lives a little less than four hours. Cinema in SD makes it run out of breath after three and a half hours, and HD - after two. It is quite acceptable.
The brightness margin of the screen is simply monstrous, immediately put it at half brightness, and this is quite enough. Built-in speakers from the sky do not grab stars - the usual ones are loud. 3 USB 2.0 ports, HDMI, card reader, DVD cutter - everything is in place.
I am far from considering the eMachines E732G the best laptop in the world - of course, there is more beautiful and faster. I will not even venture to claim that it is the cheapest in its class, although I only saw a lower price for the options on the AMD Athlon II Dual-Core with a frequency of 2.1-22 GHz. But this is an unambiguously sensible workhorse with decent performance, without weird quacks and, it seems, not without grace.
When I wrote this post, I suddenly discovered that these Linux laptops appeared everywhere instead of Windows 7 HB, and even cheaper - from 19,500 rubles. Two weeks ago, I saw this only in one online store, and they said that it was not available. Of course, I convince myself that I saved a lot of time on installing the OS and drivers, but, on the other hand, saving 5000 rubles instead of 2500 is also a passion that is both pleasant and useful. Well, who knew?
But now I can calmly switch to thinking about upgrading my work laptop, the single-core processor of which is already plainly unable to cope even with web pages. If there will be what to write based on the results, I will certainly do it.