Acer TravelMate 8732TG review

Most 13.3in laptops are thin and light, but the Acer TravelMate 8732TG bucks the trend. It's 31mm thick at the front, rising to a tubby 50mm at the rear, and it weighs 2.1kg. But that's all due to its biggest strength: the battery.

Protruding from the back is a 6,000mAh unit, which produces impressive results: in our light-use test, with Wi-Fi off and an idle desktop, it lasted a full nine hours, and when pushed to the limit it made 2hrs 17mins.

The discrepancy is down to Acer's use of switchable graphics. When idle it runs on the integrated Intel HD Graphics, but a click of a system tray icon shifts responsibility to the Nvidia GeForce 310M graphics card. This means that the 8732TG can be used for games and other apps that demand 3D acceleration: it averaged 36fps in Crysis at Low quality at the screen's 1,366 x 768 resolution.

Our model (part code LX.TX303 014) includes a 2.4GHz Core i5-450M and 4GB of DDR3 RAM, which powered the Acer to 1.45 in our benchmarks. That's more than enough for video-editing work, where the 500GB hard disk will also be handy. Our only gripe is the presence of 32-bit Windows 7 Professional rather than the 64-bit version needed to use all that RAM.

It's well connected too, with 802.11n Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet, along with the latest Bluetooth 3 radio. Its three USB 2 ports are spread across both flanks, and there's also a DVD drive.

A fingerprint reader sits between the mouse buttons, and the multitouch pad is responsive. The keys are a little light on travel, but are well laid out. The display is muted compared to the glossy panels on many laptops, though, and there's minor backlight bleed visible around the edges.

You also get only a single year's warranty cover, which we would recommend you upgrade. But when all this comes at a cost of just £677 exc VAT, it's hard to complain.

Author: David Bayon