Acer Aspire 9423WSMi review

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Verdict:

This slim desktop replacement notebook comes with Windows Vista Home Premium installed. This is a decent notebook, but it doesn't shine in any area. If you want a desktop replacement notebook, you're better off with the Zoostorm.

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: £800

Supplier: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Windows Vista Home Premium includes Media Center. This means you get a streamlined media-browsing interface and an excellent electronic programme guide (EPG), although with no tuner the latter is of little use.

Having a 17in display helps when watching DVDs or looking at photos. It has a native resolution of 1,440x900 pixels, so there's plenty of space to work with. Unfortunately, it has a grainy finish that detracts from fine detail. It's not the brightest display here, and the backlighting is uneven around its edges.

The big screen means there's space for a number pad. All the keys are well sized, but they provide little tactile feedback, and the keyboard flexes slightly. The touch pad is big, accurate and has pleasantly clicky buttons.

Inside, there's a big 120GB hard disk for storing media files. There are four USB ports, Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet and a memory card reader, but no FireWire ports.

PERFORMANCE

The Aspire 9423WSMi uses an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 processor and produced a score of 130 overall in our application benchmarks. This is a little below average for the group. It has 1GB of RAM inside, though, so it can handle memory intensive tasks such as video editing.

The Nvidia GeForce 7300 graphics chipset has only 64MB of dedicated video memory, but it can also borrow some of the system's main memory when needed. It's not very quick and it produced just 4.9fps in our Doom 3 test. Those who want to play games should look elsewhere. It's not ideal for travellers as the battery lasted less than two and a half hours.

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