Notebook Hunter

The big computer brand Acer is particularly aggressive in the market at the moment and several retailers – starting with Harvey Norman a few weeks ago - are offering some quite unbelievable  deals. The best one late is a $698 ($599 with cashback) Core i5 notebook being offered by Victorian retailer PC Wholesale.

[UPDATE: We first mentioned this a few weeks ago, but the special, incredibly, is still running]

This is for an Acer 5741 that’s powered by Intel’s powerful mainstream CPU, the Core i5.  The Acer is the lowest priced Core i5 machine yet and it comes with a good sized 500GB hard drive and big 15.6in screen. To put it into perspective, a notebook with a lower-performing Core i3 (the entry level CPU in Intel's current mainstream range) would be an excellend deal in the $600 to $699 price range, let alone a Core i5.

To achieve this price, PC Wholesale offers the notebook with 2GBs of memory. That’s enough to get Windows 7 out of bed and do basic computing, but if you add another 2GBs to get a total of 4GBs you suddenly have a high-performance machine that’s a match for notebooks costing several hundred dollars more.

PC Wholesale say that if you take  the special with cashback for $599, adding another 2GBs of memory would add $49 for a total cost of $648. Nothing else currently available comes close to that.

Also bear in mind that notebooks at this price level tend to come with 320GB hard drives instead of the Acer’s generous 500GB hard drive. It also has a a DVD drive,  3 USB ports, a 5-in-1 card reader . And if you check the photo, it’s a nice looking machine as well.

You can buy the machine from the PC Wholesale retail store in Clayton, Victoria, or from the website. Shipping is $20 to anywhere in Australia.


See the deal below