Acer Aspire 5652?

Hi

I'm new to buying laptops, but this one looks likes the best one for
me:

http://www.acer.co.uk/public/acereuro/page4.do-sp=page3&dau22.oid=15216&UserCtxParam=0&GroupCtxParam=0&dctx1=17&CountryISOCtxParam=UK&LanguageISOCtxParam=en&crc=1863089789.htm

LX.ABV05.047 is the one - Acer UK just told me that the LX.ABV05.022
model (smaller hard-disk, T2300 instead of T2300E processor) has been
discontinued.

Does anyone have one of these, or an opinion on them? The general
review-consensus from a Google search seems to be that they're good
powerful machines, but heavier and hotter-running than some - which
isn't a problem for me. None of the reviews mentions noise; if it runs
hot it might be noisy as well.

What I plan to use it for is:
- Development (SQL Server, Vis Studio etc)
- Audio recording/editing (when budget allows, I'll get something like
an Echo outboard Firewire card for this, possibly also external 7200rpm
HDD - I can't find any laptops that have onboard 7200 rpm).
- Games - though I'm not fussed about playing the very latest games at
enormous frame-rates, the Nvidia 7600 card in this machine is one of
the big plus points for me.
- The Firewire port is a must, which cuts down on my choice of machines
(people tell me that USB latest-version is almost as fast, but some
gear, especially pro-audio stuff, insists on Firewire).

Does the downgrade from the T2300 processor to T2300E matter at all?
As far as I can see from Intel's site, the only difference is that the
E doesn't do "Virtualising Technology" - which I'd never even heard of,
so I guess I can live without it.

Also does anyone know of a reseller who'd bump the memory up from 1Gb
to 2Gb for a reasonable price? Course I could buy the chips then do it
myself (built a lot of desktops in my time, laptops can't be that
different - in terms of memory at least), but then I'd end up with two
expensive and useless 512Mb chips. What I was hoping was that some
reseller would upgrade the memory for the difference in price between
2x512Mb and 2x1Gb, plus no doubt some labour charge.

Maybe I can't be too fussy about resellers anyway, as the availability
of this machine at the moment is terrible.

thanks for any comments


Seb

.

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