Acer Aspire 2020

Pentium M chips have found their place in multimedia notebook PCs, and Acer is taking full advantage of that with the Acer Aspire 2020. The system comes with the exceptional Intel Pentium M 745 (1.8-GHz), which packs plenty of performance and terrific battery life for a multimedia powerhouse. Two unexpected bonuses: The system weight (6.7 pounds) is reasonably light, and the design is an aesthetic crowd pleaser.

You can almost see your reflection in the Aspire 2020's silver aluminum casing. The large chassis needed to house the 15.4-inch TFT display leaves room for a full-size keyboard with a respectable pair of speakers on each side. Below the keyboard, you'll find digital-display and multimedia-function keys, which launch and control Acer's multimedia software suite. The Aspire Arcade utility will play your music MP3s and CDs without you having to boot up your system, or at least Acer says it will. On our test unit, it didn't work until we turned the system on.

The Aspire 2020's performance on our tests was impressive, starting with a rousing 22.0 score on Business Winstone 2004 and a 24.2 on Multimedia Content Creation 2004. Both these scores beat out the HP Pavilion zd7000, which carries an Intel Pentium 4 3.2-GHz processor and 1GB of DDR RAM. Even more remarkable is the 4 hours 21 minutes that the 2020 delivered on our BatteryMark tests. Thank the miserly Pentium M CPU for that; other portables in this class that use desktop CPUs manage only 2 hours or so.

The Aspire 2020 is also very capable of running games, thanks to the Mobility ATI Radeon 9700 GPU with 128MB RAM. The system's 802.11g wireless scores were adequate at both short (19.8Mbps) and long range (1.4Mbps). Most of the connectivity options are in the back: FireWire, VGA, S-Video, parallel, and three USB ports; Ethernet; and a modem. A multiformat DVDRW burner (that can also handle DVD-RAM media) is a plus, as is the 4-in-1 card reader (SD, MultimediaCard, MS, SM). Two LED buttons easily enable and disable Bluetooth and 802.11g wireless.

Other systems in the 15.4-inch display arena, the HP Pavilion zx5000 ($1,502) and the Sony VAIO VGN-A190 ($2,799), have brighter and higher contrast screens (BrightView and Xbrite, respectively) than the 2020. The Toshiba P25-S670 ($2,699), our current Editor's Choice among multimedia portables, offers a wider array of features (such as component-video out) and a bigger (17-inch) screen. But overall, the Acer Aspire 2020 combines the best of all worlds: manageable size, raw performance, and good multimedia support.

Source : http://www.pcmag.com/