Professional Grade Notebooks/Laptops

For many years now we have been selling Acer TravelMate series notebooks as our main portable product line.

They come out of the box relatively clean, meaning that they come out of the box with very little third party software installed on them.

We have been so busy with server related sales and projects lately, that we have had very few notebook sales since late last year. Today, one of our clients is getting set to refresh some of their Acer units so we dropped into Acer’s site to see what was available.

Acer TravelMate 5740G-6765

Windows 7 Pro 32 bit, Core i5 520M, 4GB RAM, etc.

Now, the equivalent Acer TravelMate 6593G series notebook we sold at the beginning of this year was about $1,800. Any guesses on what the 5740G would sell for?

If you guessed that it was around $1,100 you would be about right.

How the manufacturer managed to shave close to $700 off the cost of the system is where we have cause for pause.

Since we have had the Toshiba Tecra S10 here in the shop, and a number of S10 series Tecras out with our clients, we are now quite sure that the best quality product for the money, in our opinion, would be the Tecra S11 series available to us at this time.

Yes, there are other manufacturer’s products out there. But, for now, we will see if we can suggest to our remaining Acer laptop based clients that they move over to Toshiba.

BTW, Toshiba (Canadian Web site) makes a Core i5 series tablet that can handle 8GB of RAM in it! The new Tecra S11-011 with an i7 620M and 8GB of RAM would be an ideal virtualization demo machine! Either machine with an Intel 160GB SSD would really step up in performance too.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer