Not Much RAM for Multitasking

The more RAM your laptop has, the faster programs will run and the greater number of windows you can work in at one time. If your needs are simple and you rarely do more than two things at once on your PC, the relatively modest amount of memory that comes installed in inexpensive laptops will be enough. Today the standard amount of RAM shipped in most PCs is 2GB. If you like to multitask–say, you want to launch a search for a file and start backing up data to a disc while you watch a news video–you need more memory.

Windows Vista Installed

Microsoft’s Windows Vista introduces more graphical and functional changes–big and small–than the OS has undergone in quite some time. Among the graphical changes, the splashiest is the glasslike transparency of overlapping windows. Flip 3D, which lets you view open windows in a cascading 3D stack on the desktop, is eye-catching too. And the Windows Sidebar displays small applets on the desktop designed for specialized purposes, such as weather reports or sports scores. On the practical side, the new systemwide integrated Instant Search lets you look for a needed file from practically anywhere and at any time. Keep in mind, however, that because Vista offers so much, it requires a speedy CPU, ample RAM, and a good graphics card. Check out the other components of this laptop to be sure that Vista can run smoothly on it.

Not Much RAM for Multitasking

The more RAM your laptop has, the faster programs will run and the greater number of windows you can work in at one time. If your needs are simple and you rarely do more than two things at once on your PC, the relatively modest amount of memory that comes installed in inexpensive laptops will be enough. Today the standard amount of RAM shipped in most PCs is 2GB. If you like to multitask–say, you want to launch a search for a file and start backing up data to a disc while you watch a news video–you need more memory.

The Acer Aspire 3003LCi is a great choice for notebook shoppers unwilling to settle for minimal features even at $499 (including rebate and store-specific offers; otherwise, the price is $649). All this Windows XP Home-based consumer notebook lacks is productivity software.

Altogether, this good-looking 6-pound portable (weight is without cables and adapter; travel weight is 7 pounds) offers a lot more than most other $500 notebooks: a 15-inch XGA screen, a big 60GB hard drive, a combination DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive for burning your own CDs, and built-in Wi-Fi with a front LED and an off/on button. The comfortable touchpad-equipped keyboard includes extras usually found on more expensive notebooks, such as a separate mouse button with a center four-way scroll, and user-programmable shortcut keys for launching your favorite applications and Web sites at the press of a button. I would be tempted to buy the 3003LCi for its USB-port layout alone, which includes one of these handy all-purpose connections on the front (there are two others).

On top of everything else, the unit performed well: The 3003LCi’s 1.8-GHz Mobile Sempron 3000+ processor and 512MB of RAM helped it edge past two other $500 notebooks PC World tested in early October. Its WorldBench 5 score of 68 is 16 percent faster than a Dell Inspiron 1200’s score of 57, and 11 percent better than an HP Compaq M2000’s score of 60. The Acer can’t match mainstream notebooks, however, lagging the average of recently tested notebooks by about 10 points.

DVD movies looked fine, though the graphics aren’t up for serious game play. And battery life will quickly leave you computing on empty: the unit lasted just 1 hour, 19 minutes in our test.

The 3003LCi has a couple of other flaws: brassy-sounding speakers and hard-to-pry-off panels covering the RAM and hard-drive compartments. But that’s about it. The system comes with a decent, one-year warranty.

Upshot: With its 60GB hard drive, 15-inch screen, built-in Wi-Fi, great keyboard, and decent performance, the $499 Acer Aspire 3003LCi could serve as a good family portable or even a lean desktop replacement.

Despite some admirable qualities, including great battery life, the Acer TravelMate 3002WTCi would not be my first ultraportable choice. It’s a snazzy-looking little wedge-shaped unit that weighs only 3.2 pounds and costs just $1199 (as of 6/26/2006). However, a clunky external optical drive and a cramped keyboard layout spoil its appeal.

With its optical drive and power adapter, the 3002WTCi weighs a not-very-ultraportable 5.3 pounds. Not only is that external drive something else to keep track of, but it’s a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, which offers far less storage capacity than the rewritable DVD drives found in competing models.

I liked the keyboard’s slant and its four user-programmable quick-launch keys, but it was hard to type on, mainly due to its half-size punctuation keys. I found these keys hard to hit consistently. Ditto for the Page Up and Page Down keys, which are positioned horizontally in the lower right corner instead of vertically down the right side. The four-way scroll button on my unit was so stiff it was almost unusable.

The 3002WTCi is loaded with features, including a vivid 12.1-inch WXGA screen and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless communications. Each wireless technology has its own handy button on the front of the notebook that serves as a combination status light and on/off switch. The TravelMate’s complement of ports is also generous for a small notebook: Three USB ports, a FireWire port, and a four-in-one-card reader.

The 3002WTCi might be the only notebook on the market right now, ultraportable or full size, that comes standard with not just one but two swappable, rear-mounted batteries, one of which is a high-capacity power pack. Although the three-cell battery lasted only 1.8 hours in our tests, the twice-as-powerful six-cell battery endured an impressive 4.7 hours. The bigger battery extends the back of the unit by an inch but adds only 3 ounces to the total weight. The batteries can’t be hot-swapped, unfortunately, but it’s still nice to have them.

The unit’s speed is decent–the 3002WTCi uses a 1.73-GHz Pentium M processor–but not phenomenal, such as what we’ve seen from models using newer dual-core chips from Intel. As configured with 512MB of RAM, this Acer earned a WorldBench 5 score of 75. That places it in line with the average of 74 earned by four other laptops we’ve tested with a 1.73-GHz Pentium M 740 processor and 512MB of RAM. While the notebook is slower at multitasking in multiple windows because of the single-core processor, it’s plenty fast enough for most applications.

Although this fact isn’t documented, the 3002WTCi is fully user-upgradable: Its 60GB hard drive and two 256MB memory modules are easily accessible via bottom compartments. (The otherwise thorough Acrobat manual omits hard drive upgrades, which led to my removing the wrong set of screws. Hint: The screws are located midcase and labeled with an a??Ha??.) For desktop cable management, a 124-pin connection on the back lets you add Acer’s optional $299 ezDock.

The 3002WTCi is nicely designed overall, and hunt-and-peck typists who do mainstream work on the go might be happy with the compact unit. Others looking for a better typing experience in an ultraportable should keep looking.

I loved my Ferrari — which is why I got rid of it after 9-months of mostly collecting dust. I discovered shortly after purchase that, not unlike rev limiters on engines, there was a “rev” limit to USB transfer rates — a SERIOUS limit. The maximum transfer rate with external USB2 drives is a paltry 12MB/sec. This is way below the real-world limit of 28-30MB/sec. Even my 5-year old Sager transferred at 28MB/sec. I’m a photographer and work with pocket-sized USB drives to offload images while on location, so a transfer rate less than half the speed it should be, translates into significantly more work time at the end of a long day. The computer was sent in to Acer twice. Each time they stated there was nothing wrong with the notebook. Only, from my standpoint, it was crippled. So as much as I loved it, I sold it. STAY AWAY from this notebook if you have serious work to do and use external hard drives. (P.S. – Firewire speeds were full and normal.)

Notebook shoppers, start your engines. The latest Acer Ferrari laptop is a good choice if you’re looking for something a little different–but not too offbeat–in a home portable. The $2399 (as of 2/6/07) Ferrari 5005WLMi offers better design and battery life than earlier Acer Ferrari models did, and it has some new features and an unusual keyboard.

Acer is the official supplier to the Scuderia Ferrari Formula One racing team, and the 5005WLMi has the candy-apple-red trim of older Ferrari laptops but a comparatively sedate black lid instead of a checkered one. Maintaining the line’s relatively svelte design, the 5005WLMi weighs 6.8 pounds without the power adapter and measures about 1.5 inches thick. The 5005WLMi also has a 15.4-inch WSXGA screen and a cool, slot-fed dual-layer DVD burner.

Other new features–which help justify the price–include an HDMI (high-definition) video connection, a 160GB hard drive, and the new ExpressCard/34 slot that supplements a PC Card reader. The built-in 1.3-megapixel Webcam is one of the better ones included with a notebook: Since it can rotate 225 degrees, you can record in front of or behind the lid, and the Acer Orbicam software provides one-click videos and snapshots.

Equipped with a high-end 2-GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 processor and 2GB of DDR2-667 SDRAM, our test unit earned a WorldBench 5 score of 98. Though we have no similarly equipped notebooks in our current all-purpose test pool, we can say that this score basically comes within range of the marks earned by other notebooks with 2-GHz Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors. The notebook’s nine-cell battery lasted 3 hours, 43 minutes, more than 25 percent longer than previous Ferraris we’ve tested.

A tad easier to upgrade than older Ferrari models, the 5005WLMi has memory slots that are located together in one bottom compartment instead of under the keyboard. Other features–including the five-in-one flash memory-card slot with attached cover, the audio ports, and a FireWire port–are conveniently positioned on the front of the notebook. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless communications have their own separate, front-mounted on and off switches, a very nice touch.

The keyboard layout includes a four-way scrolling button to save time negotiating documents and Web pages, plus four user-programmable quick-launch buttons. The slight 5-degree, U-shaped curve of the keyboard, however, takes some getting used to, as the design makes you hold out your elbows a bit.

The 5005WLMi’s gaming-friendly 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 video card helped the notebook rank second in our graphics tests among currently tested all-purpose models. Other notebooks, though, are better equipped for pure entertainment, as the Ferrari lacks one-touch DVD and CD access and a subwoofer. Even productivity applications cost extra. But if solid performance, the latest features, and race-car colors rev your engine, take a look.

The case, trimmed in Ferrari-red carbon fiber, is solidly built. The front is a jumble of multiple slots, ports, and lights; but it conveniently includes a five-in-one card reader, microphone and headphone ports, and battery and power status lights. The front also has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi LED buttons, which are more convenient than software settings for controlling and monitoring your wireless connections. The right side of the case contains a removable slot-fed DVD burner and three of the laptop’s four USB ports. On the rear, sits a DVI port and a 124-pin connector for Acer’s EzDock port replicator. The left of the case contains a standard VGA port.

Notable among the Ferrari 4000’s multimedia talents is its ability to play good-looking DVD movies on a 1680-by-1050-pixel WSXGA+ 15.4-inch wide screen. Too bad the front-mounted speakers sound merely average and the machine lacks volume and other media-control buttons. Acer does include the handy GridVista utility, which lets you drag and drop application windows into one of four grid windows of preset size.

The Ferrari 4000 is the first Top 15 Notebooks candidate to have AMD’s Turion processor–the 1.8-GHz Turion 64 ML-34. With that CPU and 1GB of RAM, the machine earned a respectable WorldBench 5 score of 85. By comparison, IBM’s ThinkPad T43–the best-performing notebook we’ve seen with a 1.86-GHz Pentium M 750 processor–earned a WorldBench 5 score of 84. The Acer’s eight-cell battery is a big grooved power pack that forms most the laptop’s rear; it lasted for 3 hours, a slightly below-average mark.

Like most other Acer keyboards, this one curves up 5 degrees on the endsan ergonomic design intended to help typists avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s easy to get the hang of typing on the Ferrari 4000: Just swing your elbows out to get your hands positioned correctly. The only problem I encountered was that the touchpad’s four-way scroll button on the test unit never functioned. The notebook comes with a Bluetooth mouse as well.

The Ferrari 4000 is pit-crew friendly, with memory slots and a hard drive that are accessible to and upgradable by users. They sit in separate bottom compartments under covers that are held in place by small screws. You can remove the optical drive, too; but Acer doesn’t sell any other devices for the modular bay. Though we didn’t receive any user manuals with our test unit, Acer says that the notebook comes with an Acrobat manual on the hard drive.

Upshot: This good-quality wide-screen model bundles such extras as a wireless Bluetooth mouse; and racing fanatics will like the Ferrari motif.

Armed with a fast processor and solid speakers, the $1999 (as of July 24, 2007) Acer Aspire 5920G is great for both work and entertainment. It bears Acer’s tritone “gemstone” case design, which looks stylish without being overly ornate. The screen is prone to some glare and battery life is so-so, but the machine can handle most types of applications.

Driven by a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7300 processor and configured with 2GB of DDR2-667 SDRAM , the 5920G notched a very good WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 77–a few points above the mark achieved by a Dell Inspiron 1720 that carried the same processor and RAM. The Aspire’s average frame rate in our graphics tests was 83 frames per second–not close to the average of 100 fps posted by recent gaming notebooks, but capable of supporting good game play nonetheless.

The 5920G lacks the dedicated number pad found on some other desktop replacements, but it offers two sets of customizable buttons. Application launch buttons and a Wi-Fi toggle switch sit on the left side of the keyboard; media controls occupy the right side.

The media controls include a button for launching Acer’s Arcade interface, which provides direct access to HD DVD movie and music playback without your having to boot up Windows. Both sounded great through this notebook’s subwoofer-assisted stereo speakers. The ‘e’ button–a blue sparkly triangular piece of keyboard trim that looks like a faux gemstone–puts sound equalizer options such as rock, pop, and classical within easy reach. This laptop also includes a 1.3-megapixel Webcam. Unfortunately, the option to get an integrated TV tuner for the 5920G is available only in Europe and Asia.

The 5920G felt comfortable to use. The mouse buttons are slightly stiff, but the four-way scroll button for moving pages in any direction is nice. Overall its keyboard is great, especially for shortcut fans. Though the super-glossy Acer CrystalBrite screen reflects fluorescent office lights unless you tilt it just right, it’s bright and easy to read otherwise.

This Windows Vista Ultimate home notebook lacks bundled applications, but it has power and style to spare. Short-list this one if you’re on the prowl for a trendy home desktop replacement.