I need a new laptop, I have been putting it off for 18 months, but post BF sales have pushed my system a bit far. AD2 Kits and AD Keys trio, and I still want to grab Amplesounds J-Bass.
 
I Have it down to a choice of 2. Living in Central Vietnam is limited in choices, and Vietnam is not a good place to get electronics deals. i7 laptops are limited and import taxes, shipping plus money tranfers costs means these are my 2. My criteria
 
i7 chip
8-16 Gb ram (I would like the choice to upgrade to 16, but I don't think it's really a factor for me. I also can't find details from the manufacturers to confirm this option), I have the product codes, but they may not be right, and I have found that they are often different codes as they are slighlty different versions for the west than the east
DVD drive, so I can change to an SSD drive later
3 USB slots, they both seem to have these
True HD, so many say HD but are 1366*768, I am tired of Sonar being truncated in Track inspector
Touch screen is a nice option, I may not use, I may love it, these both have it.

These are the details from the shop, but they may not accurate, they often make mistakes, and in the specifications catalogue they had spelt HP Envy Touch as Tuoch. I have marked in red in the table the specs I have found conflicting info on the net about, or I have su****ions about
 
I don't know Windows 8, so can someone tell me, how I get to the screen to check the System Specs, for the Chip, Ram and the screen to tell me if its 1920*1080
 
 
 
Cheers
 
 

I'm certainly no expert, but I do know one thing, The Hard drive looks like they are 5400 RPM on the Acer, and the other one might be too..What good is a 24Gig SSD? is that what it's saying? .. it's easy to change this, but I would at least try and get one with a SSD drive or at least a 7200 RPM sata drive. Fast hard drives are pretty important for audio. Touch screen is not. 
How hard is it to return products there? There are laptops that cannot be used for audio because of DPCLAT issues. From what I understand you cannot bring the DPCLAT under control because it's things in the BIOS. If you can, buy a Mac. At least they seem stable for audio. You can bootcamp it. 

Yeah, not bothered about the 5400, because I have no choice. This isn't a factor, because it isn't a choice, all of the shelf lappies are 5400 here. The 24GB sdd is just part of the 1 TB drive, its a hybrid, not a separate drive, just helps boot up times I believe. As I noted, I wanted to make sure it had a DVD drive, which isn't as standard as it used to be, as I can switch this out for and better SSD later. 
 
No chance of returning anything. My choices are restricted. 
 
Not getting a mac  

Can someone with Windows 8 knowledge let me know this
"I don't know Windows 8, so can someone tell me, how I get to the screen to check the System Specs, for the Chip, Ram and the screen to tell me if its 1920*1080"
 

Done, signature updated.
Now I just need to install everything
Looks like it's not clogged up with too much bloat ware, which is good.

Wish I would have seen this sooner, I would have said Asus.
 
First thing you want to do when you get the machine is to reinstall Windows. Hell, if you can, find someone with a Windows 8 Pro disk and use that instead (just make sure you get your Windows license from the machine first) and format using the disk. Reason being is that HP comes with so much bloatware in it that uses up a ton of resources that it can really bog your system down when working with audio.

Actually it doesn't seem to bad in the way of bloatware, though I don't get the distinctions between apps and programmes, as Windows 8 seems like its half mobile phone. There is a suite of programes such as movie makers, but beyond that it doesn't look to to bad in the programand features page. I've had a few laptops that have been far worse
 
Ran Latencymon before doing anything, and after I turned of the network adaptor it was happy. It ran for an hour
 
I've installed Sonar from a hard drive, but my biggest download is from XLN and being it runs from an installer, so I can't copy files across from the other laptop (I assume) and being that the internet is awful in this country, I am expecting that download to stiill be running when I wake in the morning, and take at least 24 hours.
 
Thanks for chipping in, but I think I have travelled too far down a road to turn back. Maybe if it becomes a cul de sac I'll go down the clean install route.
 

My Mother in Laws Desktop is a HP and I never had to do much with it. She's real sick so the wife likes to spend a lot of time there, So I take my Scarlett and installed X3e and bring my projects on an External drive.  It's just an off the shelf HP from Costco, it's even on line when I'm using it via cat5 network. It's W7 so I ran DPCLAT and it's under 100 even with all the bloatware. Acers are OK, I had one and it lasted 8 years. But there's a reason why a lot of offices and businesses use HP. There are hundreds of them where I work at the Hospital. 
 
Windows 8 will hide stuff from you and do it's thing, If it passes the Latency Mon test there's really nothing to fuss about, just use it. 
One thing I'll recommend that others here use is to install Classic Shell. Sorry I don't have the link but it is mentioned in any thread here that asks about Windows 7 VS Windows 8. 
It gives you a Windows 7 start menu. Or XP. 

Cakewalk seem to use HP's too, so that gave me a little piece of mind. My Fist laptop 12 years back wasa HP Pavilion, and the firewire connector snapped off the mother board. I had shipped it in to the UK for the US, so it was a bother getting an engineer to fix it, but they did. After it was fixed  (motherboard replaced) I went to re-use, and questioned the fit o the cable, so borrowed a flatmates firewire and it just slipped on easily. Turned out my M-Audio firewire cable was too tight a fit and causing fatigue, so not HP's fault at all.
 
I think it's running in classic view, I think the shop has tinkered. They open everything here to check it. (even RAM has been opened by not earthed people and they put a sticker on it. They love putting stickers on everything, my laptop has 3 of the same). My User directory carries the name of the shop, not my administrator name. They asked me what software I wanted, they were going to chuck loads of free stuff on, which I guess most customers like, and seemed confused about my 'just give it to me attitude'. In hind sight I should have done a system reset, but I have spent too long downloading stuff from XLN and installing Sonar, to go now. 
 
 
Regards Acer, my travel laptop is now over 2 years oln, It's a small 800*600 display, but I love it. It's chucked in my bag everyday pretty much, and my go to laptop for most things. I'm pretty happy with it's build quality.  I'd definitely consider another little one like this when the time comes over tablet