Acer Aspire 5514WLMi review

The Acer's Pentium M 760 processor runs at a heady 2GHz and with a gigabyte of ultra-fast DDR2 RAM, it stormed through our application benchmarks with an impressive score.

This is a laptop with enough welly to contend with serious applications for some time to come. The Aspire is no slouch when it comes to gaming either. An ATI Radeon X700 graphics chipset is partnered with 128MB of its own memory and this helped the Acer Aspire slice through our Doom 3 test.

SUPERB SCREEN

All this performance would go to waste if the display was fuzzy and indistinct, but thankfully, Acer hasn't skimped here either. Measuring a sizable 15.4 inches from corner to corner and with a native resolution of 1280x800 pixels, this is an impressive display. Colours were vibrant and accurately reproduced. The Acer also managed to smoothly discern between blacks and very dark greys. Even the shadowy corners of Doom 3 were no trouble as the screen revealed all the subtle detail that was lost on the HP. At the other end of the scale, the Aspire presented a clean, pure, bright white. Thanks to the Aspire's excellent screen, DVDs looked absolutely stunning and there was no hint of ghosting or smearing, even in very fast moving action scenes.

GREAT SPEC AND IT'S A TV TOO

The Acer is a superb machine for watching movies and playing games, but that's not the extent of its talents. It also has a built- in TV tuner that can receive both analogue and digital signals. Two adaptors are included - one for hooking the Acer up to a quality external aerial such as the one sitting on your roof and a portable aerial for receiving the best quality TV signals while on the move.

The supplied Acer Arcade software looks similar to Cyberlink's PowerCinema 4 - this is because it's the same program. Acer Arcade is wonderfully straightforward to use and its simple, uncluttered interface is easily navigated with the supplied remote control. Watching and recording TV is a cinch, and it also lets you browse music and pictures on your hard disk, as well as watch DVDs. The portable aerial made a good stab at picking up both digital and analogue signals, but we couldn't pick up all the available digital channels. Picture quality is totally dependent on where you are and how good the reception is, though. Hooking the Aspire up to an external aerial helped us find all the channels we'd expect and we were soon happily watching an episode of Poirot on ITV3.

Not content with being the fastest notebook on test, the Acer's battery also lasted the longest. The HP wasn't far behind, but the Aspire nosed in front with an hour and 33 minutes in our intensive test. This extended to an impressive 2 hours and 33 minutes when playing back a DVD movie.

The rest of the Acer's specification is equally stunning. The giant 100GB hard disk is a whole 20GB larger than those of its competitors. 100GB is roomy enough to store oodles of games, applications, music and documents before you'll need to start backing stuff up onto writeable DVD discs. When you do, the slot-loading DVD writer is one of the quickest we've seen in a laptop. It supports writing to every type of DVD disc, including the new DVD-R dual-layer discs. The cherry on top is a little breakout cable that allows you to hook up a camcorder or VCR via composite or S-Video connections and archive your dusty old family videos.

BUYING DECISIONS

The Acer may cost substantially more than the other laptops here, but it's worth every penny. If we were to be really picky we'd complain that the built-in speakers are a little insubstantial and sound fairly tinny. But whether you're using it for games, movies, watching TV or surfing the Net, the Acer excels and easily deserves its Recommended award.