The Acer Aspire AS5742G – 7200 is one of the better laptops available in the market but with a little more price paid, much better laptops can be obtained. The Acer Aspire AS5742G – 7200 is a 15.6 inches laptop with an Intel Core i5 processor, a 500 GB hard drive, Nvidia GeForce GT420 M graphics and a 4 GB RAM.

Design

The Acer Aspire comes in an unexceptional design which is thick and dressed in a matte finish with black patterned plastic, a robust machine feeling with an easily carried size. The laptop has a full stretched keyboard and number pad inside, a large space for the power button alone with monophonic entrenched speakers. A broad palm rest is found underneath with an enclosed multi-touch touchpad which is rather small for what should be in a laptop. Like the overall matte plastic texture of the laptop, the rocker style button bar below the touchpad is also made of matte plastic.

The full stretched keyboard of this laptop however, is flat and comfortable with broad, flat and widely spaced keys. The design of it is pretty irksome where the keys are raised and have spaces in between them to easily trap dust particles and crumbs whereas the flexible keys of this keyboard are quite fragile when compared to other laptops keys.

The 15.6 inches display screen is backlit by a vibrant and big LED with a typical resolution of 1366×768 pixels which is not what a high end laptop offers. Big screens allow you to closely look at pixels but on this screen video, images and text appear very brittle and that also with limited viewing angles. The monophonic speaker of this laptop is a disappointing factor which is located on the top left side in grilles beyond the keyboard. The speaker lacks oomph, stereo sound quality and overall volume which makes the sound quality of videos and music very poor.

The Acer Aspire laptop has HDMI but no USB 3.0, eSATA or Bluetooth ports, which is a basic in every laptop. The Acer Aspire laptop has the Intel Core i5 460 M processor which is not a next-gen processor but is good enough when compared with the previous year’s laptops. The Acer Aspire AS5742G – 7200 is capable of handling multitasking, HD video streaming and performing daily tasks very well. The most highlighting feature of this laptop is its Nvidia GeForce GT 420 M graphic chip card which also makes it a feasible laptop. Although, the Nvidia graphic chip is not the latest version, it is still great in giving graphical performance and handles games pretty well. The game quality of this laptop is so good that it was confused as a game laptop but later clarified as a good option for game divers.

Performance

When tested on the video playback battery drain test, the six celled removable battery of the laptop lasted for 2 hours and 37 minutes when it should have been capable of running for 3 hours at least!