Labs

The Aspire 7720G's large beige chassis and 17in widescreen display make it more suitable for home users than those who have to work on the move. The laptop has an HD DVD drive, and high-definition films look great on the glossy, vibrant screen, which exhibited highly accurate colours in our tests. Toshiba has pulled the plug on HD DVD, so the laptop won't play future high-definition films. Still, you're not paying a premium for the drive.

The laptop's mini subwoofer-assisted speakers have better than average sound quality, but if you need more volume than this there's an optical S/PDIF socket to output Dolby Digital film soundtracks to a surround-sound system.

The

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keyboard has a useful numeric keypad, but our fingers caught the underside of the flimsy space bar on a couple of occasions. The position and sensitivity of the touch pad also means the cursor flies off course at the slightest touch, causing regular typing errors.

The chassis has room for two hard disks, and Acer has filled both slots with 160GB models. This gives a generous 287GB of formatted space, but it pushes up the laptop's weight to a back-breaking 3.62kg. Still, 17in desktop-replacement laptops aren't designed for regular travel, so the relatively meagre two-hour battery life won't be much of a problem.

The Aspire has an impressive specification, with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM and GeForce 8400M GS graphics, but its rivals here show that these aren't the best components available for the cash. Performance was a little below average in all our benchmark tests, which shouldn't impinge on office and web-related tasks but will slow down creative software. 3D performance is fine for older games, but we had to switch off anti-aliasing and drop the resolution to 640x480 pixels before Call of Duty 2 became playable.

There's a lot to like about Acer's Aspire 7720G, but Asus's F7Sr is a faster and better-specified laptop.