Product Reviews

We reviewed Acer's Aspire 5514 in What's New, Shopper February 2006 and gave it a five-star review for its combination of features and power. This month we're looking at its bigger brother, the 9504. The key difference is the display size, increased from 15.4" to 17", making the 9504 a fully fledged desktop replacement.

A number pad has been added alongside the keyboard, but this affected some keys. The arrow keys are half the width you'd expect, and the Enter button is barely twice the size of the letter keys. Luckily, the touch pad is large, accurate and offset to the left, so you won't accidentally touch it while typing. The chassis has over 20 ports, including five USB2 ports, a memory card reader and DVI output.

The 17" display is the brightest we've seen on a notebook. The gloss coating aids contrast and colour, but reflections from office lights are a problem. The 1,440x900 resolution

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gives lots of room to work, and enough pixels to make the best of HD video. It's the size of some small LCD TVs, and with its incredible brightness could easily stand in for one.

Acer has included a hybrid TV tuner like the one on the 5514. We love the Acer Arcade software, as it's based on CyberLink's PowerCinema 4 application. This lets you play back all your media files from one easy-to-use, attractive interface. It includes an EPG to help schedule recordings. A large 100GB hard disk provides lots of storage space, while the DVD writer can be used for backups.

A pair of remotes is provided: one mini remote in the PC Card slot and a larger one with more buttons. There are dedicated control buttons on the front of the chassis, and an option to boot into a dedicated media player, thus avoiding Windows.

Inside the chassis is an ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics chipset. This is perfect for casual gamers, giving playable frame rates in the latest games. Application performance is excellent, with the 2GHz Pentium M 760 processor and 1GB of RAM providing plenty of power. It scored 106 overall in our benchmarks, partly due to a fast DVD writer. In practice, it will perform similarly to the 5514. Battery life is less than two-and-a-half hours, though, and it weighs almost four kilos, so you won't want to transport it far.

This brighter version of the 5514 has no big drawbacks apart from size. It's a terrific all-in-one entertainment notebook with real computing power.