The Acer Aspire 5742 is a 15-inch budget laptop for users interested in a basic laptop for home use around Rs. 30,000. The Acer Aspire 5742 breaks the monotone of dull-looking Acer Aspire laptops of the past and brings in a colorful new look and design. Let’s look at what the Aspire 5742 laptop offers for home users.

Looks and Design
The first thing you notice about the Acer Aspire 5742 is its surprisingly good-looking exterior. We were all bored to death with Acer’s Aspire range of laptops sporting a blue-on-gray color scheme — Acer Aspire 5740G, Aspire 4740, Aspire 5740 and Aspire 5542G, for example.

If there’s one gripe we had of past Acer Aspire laptops it had to do with the respective laptops’ boring looks. So it’s a welcome change to see the Acer Aspire 5742 draped in a bright red exterior on it screen lid, palmrest and touchpad.

The Acer Aspire 5742’s exterior is non-glossy — opposite to Acer Aspire laptops of the past — so it attracts no fingerprints. What’s more, the Aspire 5742 laptop’s screen lid has a nice mesh pattern which looks and feels good — it’s similar to the Compaq Presario CQ42 and HP G42 laptop.

The Aspire 5742 laptop is decently built for its price and weighs 2.25-kg with a standard 6-cell battery — which is very good for a 15-inch budget home laptop. It’s lighter than some of the other 15-inch laptops we’ve reviewed like the Dell Inspiron 15R, Dell Inspiron M501R and Lenovo IdeaPad Y560.

Usability: Screen, Keyboard, Touchpad
The Acer Aspire 5742 comes with a 15.6-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with a 1366×768 pixel resolution. Nothing different from most 15-inch laptops sold in the market currently. The Aspire 5742’s display is pretty good for reading text or watching movies, although it isn’t very good for outdoor use. Overall, the laptop’s screen has good viewing angles, by laptop standards. The Acer Aspire 5742 laptop’s included webcam is good for videochats over the Web.

The Aspire 5742 laptop’s keyboard is like the new Acer Aspire Timeline X 4820TG and Aspire 5745G laptop’s keyboard, sporting isolated, chiclet-styled keys that are nice to type on. The Aspire 5742’s keyboard also has a dedicated number pad on the right which is good. The Aspire 5742’s laptop dips ever so slightly while typing but overall works just fine.

The Aspire 5742 laptop’s palmrest has a finely textured surface which is nice and responsive while moving the cursor around with your finger. If anything, the touchpad could’ve been a bit larger, but it is of average size. The Aspire 5742’s singe-strip mouse button takes a while getting used to, but one can definitely work with it.

The Acer Aspire 5742 comes with the innards of any budget home laptop, there’s nothing new to speak of here. The Aspire 5742 laptop has a 2.4-GHz Intel Core i3-370M processor, 2GB RAM, 500GB hard drive and onboard Intel HD graphics. The Acer Aspire 5742 laptop has sufficient RAM and better storage space than the Lenovo IdeaPad Z460 and Compaq Presario CQ42 laptop. For a basic 15-inch home laptop, the Acer Aspire 5742 comes with adequate basic hardware.

In terms of features and connectivity port, the Acer Aspire 5742 laptop comes with three USB ports, VGA, HDMI, Gigabit ethernet, and multicard reader. There is no eSATA port or an ExpressCard slot, but you can’t expect every mainstream laptop feature in a budget laptop. For wireless connectivity, the Aspire 5742 laptop has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1. The laptop comes with an optical drive, one year’s warranty, but no Windows operating system — part of the reason why it sells for such a low price.

Performance
The Acer Aspire 5742 performs very well for a laptop selling at Rs. 30,000. We installed Windows 7 Ultimate version to benchmark the laptop, and it got a WorldBench 6 score of 95 — pretty good for a laptop of its class. Watching movies, working on productivity suite, browsing the Web, etc., won’t be a problem on the Acer Aspire 5742 laptop. Gaming, obviously, isn’t an option on the Aspire 5742 budget home laptop — nor on any other budget laptop featured in our Top 5 Budget Laptops list.

The Acer Aspire 5742 laptop’s audio-video performance is also good for a budget laptop, nothing great though. Watching movies is comfortable on the glossy widescreen display, and accompanying audio is ably pumped out on two speakers situated underneath the black strip above the Acer laptop’s keyboard replacement deck.

As far as battery life goes, the Aspire 5742 laptop. In our battery tests, conducted at high performance mode and full-screen brightness, the Aspire 5742 laptop managed to last 1 hour 22 minutes, which is better than any other budget laptop listed in our Top 5 Budget Laptops list. Easily expect over 3 hours of browsing the Web over Wi-Fi on a conservative battery plan, which is nice for the Aspire 5742.

Bottom Line

The Acer Aspire 5742 currently sells at a price of Rs. 30,605 — EUP is even lesser, around Rs. 28,000. For that price you get a basic 15-inch laptop that offers nice performance, has sufficient features, and very good battery life. Importantly, the Acer Aspire 5742 is a pivotal moment in Acer’s Aspire laptop range — it’s better looking than past Acer laptops. Its only drawback is it doesn’t come with a Windows OS.

Out of our Top 5 Budget Laptops, for slightly more price, the Acer Aspire 5742 is currently a better bet than the Compaq Presario CQ42 and Lenovo IdeaPad Z460 laptop. A very good value for money laptop, if you want to dump your old laptop and buy a newer machine at Rs. 30,000, consider the Acer Aspire 5742.