Product Reviews

These days there seems to be a laptop to suit everybody. This is great, of course, but it can also be confusing. Do you want a portable notebook with a long-life battery for travelling, or a powerful machine that can edit your home videos and play DVD movies? Do you want to play the very latest 3D games in widescreen, or have a large keyboard that makes typing long reports comfortable?

Acer's Aspire 9504WSMi is a clever laptop that does almost everything. It has a Centrino processor that helps to conserve battery life, but it can still storm through demanding jobs like video editing. It can also play DVDs in gorgeous widescreen, without waiting to boot Windows, and you can even use it as a widescreen digital TV.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX?

The Aspire is fairly large, but not as chunky as many powerful notebooks. From the moment you pick it up, it's obvious that it has been well built. The lid is impressively solid and there's no cheap bendy plastic to be found anywhere.

Buttons on the front of the case activate the Arcade media system. This allows you to quickly start the computer without having to wait to load Windows. After a few seconds, you can watch DVDs and play video and music files that are stored on your laptop.

Best of all, you can use the Aspire as a portable television. A small socket at the back of the laptop allows you to plug in an aerial and you can then access analogue or Freeview stations via the Arcade media function. In our tests it was easy to tune and found all the Freeview channels, while its picture quality was impressive. Our only complaint was that the maximum volume level is fairly quiet. A mini aerial and remote control are also included.

Four USB 2 ports are

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available, as well as DVI and D-Sub monitor outputs. Inside there's a huge 100GB hard disk and a slot-loading DVD writer. You can connect to the Internet wirelessly, and connecting to a mobile phone or PDA is easy with the built-in Bluetooth.

DAZZLING SCREEN

The Aspire is a fairly wide laptop, so there's plenty of room for its keyboard. It has a separate number pad to the right, just like on a desktop PC. Annoyingly, the cursor and Enter keys are slightly squashed, making them a little uncomfortable to use. The touchpad is a good size though, and works well with its comfortable buttons.

The Aspire's screen is dazzling. It has a resolution of 1440x900 pixels, and is widescreen, so movies look great. Its reflective coating also gives colours more contrast, but this can be annoying if you work near bright lights that get reflected in the shiny screen. The horizontal viewing angle is impressive, so two or three people can comfortably sit down and watch a TV programme or a DVD together.

IMPRESSIVE GAMING POWER

With a 2GHz Pentium M processor and a whopping 1GB of memory inside, it's not surprising that the Aspire is a portable powerhouse. It chomped through our demanding benchmarks without complaint, scoring an impressive 107.38 overall.

More surprising is that it can also play 3D games. Generally, only expensive and large gaming notebooks get on well with the latest 3D extravaganzas, but the Aspire's Radeon X700 graphics chip does a very good job. It ran our Doom 3 test at 24.9fps, and you can make games go even faster by reducing the level of on-screen detail.

Even more impressively, all this power doesn't mean that the Aspire needs to be confined to a desk all the time. It ran for just under two and a half hours in our intensive battery test, so it's got enough power for use in the garden, on the train or just for watching a DVD in bed.

BUYING DECISIONS

Simply put, the Aspire is a brilliant notebook that can do almost anything. It's even more powerful than the fantastic Gateway 8550GB that we reviewed last month and has a better battery. It's also a great way to watch television or DVDs. If you'll never use the TV functions then buy the cheaper Gateway, but if you want a do-everything system for entertainment use, this is the notebook to buy.