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If youre looking for an inexpensive laptop you dont have to limit yourself to a netbooks small screen and keyboard. There are plenty of more powerful and flexible laptops available for not a huge amount extra. One example is Acers Aspire 5552, a fully-featured 15.6in laptop for just £50 more than netbooks such as the Packard Bell Dot S.
The 5552s 2.1GHz AMD Athlon II X2 processor doesnt give astounding performance, but an overall score of 54 in our benchmarks shows it is more than powerful enough for web browsing, office work and even more advanced tasks such as image editing. Its also more than double the performance of even the fastest netbook. A generous 3GB of memory, DVD re-writer and a 320GB hard disk round off the internal components, which is a great specification for the price. The six-cell battery lasted just over four hours in our light-use battery test, which is average for a 15in laptop.
The onboard ATI HD 4250 graphics chip doesnt have its own dedicated memory so must share system RAM with Windows, but its still powerful enough to play high definition video. You can appreciate the details of 720p footage on the 1,366×768 resolution screen, or output 1080p video to a television or monitor from the HDMI output. Unfortunately a dismal 3.8fps in our Call of Duty 4 test shows it isnt capable of playing modern games. Older titles and casual games will still be playable at lower settings.
The screens image quality is average. Colours looked slightly washed out at default settings, even though brightness was reasonable. We found viewing angles fairly wide and theres plenty of tilt adjustment, but the reflective surface suffers from reflections under office lighting.
A single small speaker above the keyboard cant produce good quality audio, sounding very tinny and quiet. At maximum volume there was noticeable distortion on our louder test tracks and a distinct lack of bass. Headphones are a must if you plan to use the Aspire 5552 to listen to music or watch films.
Like most Acer laptops, the Aspire 5552 has a flat keyboard with chiclet keys. We were pleased to see that all except the arrow keys were full-size, even with the dedicated number pad. Key response wasnt particularly crisp, but we still didnt have any difficulty typing. Cursor movement using the relatively small touchpad was smooth, but theres a huge dead spot in the centre of the single rocker-style button.
The Aspire 5552 certainly isnt perfect, as its display is disappointing and the keyboard isnt up to the standard of Acers more expensive laptops, but its still a reasonable low-cost laptop. If you need a larger screen than a netbook and a full-size keyboard, its a good choice.
