I picked up an Acer Aspire 5740 laptop a few weeks ago. Thanks to the forums over at Ars Technica I considered purchasing a Solid State Drive (SSD) to replace the traditional hard drive. Based on their recommendations, I picked up the Intel G2 X25M 80GB Mainstream SSD. The sale price was $220, down from the suggested retail of around $280.

Installation was very easy, and I put a fresh copy of Windows 7 on. Installation time was pretty fast. I got the impression that the SSD was faster overall, but was it worth $220 and 1/4th the storage capacity of my stock 5400rpm laptop drive?

Overall, life with the SSD was faster. I was interested in increasing my battery life, and decreasing my startup and resume times. I didn’t really care too much about faster reading and writing speeds, except how it related to opening programs and waking my computer up from sleep.

Benchmarks for SSDs concentrate on raw disk performance, but I didn’t really care about that. What was the impact of an SSD for a casual, daily laptop user?
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I’ll be honest. I had laptop envy. It struck me pretty hard over the winter holiday, wherein my friends and family spent time cruising the Internet and doing work while all sitting within thirty feet of each other. I retreated up to my office to dink around on my workstation, labeling me both as anti-social and a gaming dork.

There was a problem with joining their mobile computing ranks, however. At the end of 2009 I bought a sweet Lenovo G450 laptop on sale for about 60% off the original price. It was equipped with an Intel dual core processor, 3GB of RAM, and had everything necessary for daily computing. It could play high definition video, had a built-in Web cam for Skyping, and plenty of output ports. I liked it so much I wanted to buy another one.

The issue was that Lenovo (and just about every laptop manufacturer, apparently), was about to transition to Intel’s new mobile processor architecture. That meant the dual core laptops were undergoing deep discounts, and that remaining stock (namely the then-top-of-the-line Core2Duo) was at full price. I waited a few months, checking deal sites and our employee purchase program discounts, but never found a comparable deal.

I resigned myself to waiting for the i3, i5 and i7 machines to come to market, get some age, and then lower in price as the second-generation of ix came to market. Essentially, I was going to have to wait for two generations to pass me by.

That is, until I saw the Acer Aspire AS 5740 i5 laptop on sale at Costco for $599.99.
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