This notebook is the winner of our Light Laptops roundup. It's solid in every area rather than outstanding in one, and very attractively priced.

A retrograde step from its predecessor, but a super low price makes this dinky PC very desirable

A huge screen and an affordable price, but it doesn’t rival a desktop PC where power is concerned

Another big name brand PC gets a cutting-edge, all-format, high-def optical drive capable of playing Blu-ray and HD DVD.

A superb package for the price, with plenty of power. Only the unambitious battery life lets it down.

A very-well designed alternative to big beefy computers which make a lot of noise.

Great design and comprehensive features make it a truly great Media Center PC. Only the price lets it down.

A decent notebook but too expensive for the features on offer.

Looks and feels good, but performance is more super Aguri than Scuderia.

Despite some welcome additions and good components, this Acer notebook is left wanting.

An impressive attempt at a good-value portable PC, but the ergonomics let it down.

Acer's latest Aspire has the familiar Acer look we've come to expect in recent months but with a few nice tweaks.

Acer and AMD are both sponsors of the Ferrari F1 team, and the relationship extends well beyond simply slapping each others logos on respective products.

The Acer Aspire 1692 WLMi is a story of compromises; a +/-/RAM dual layer burner and gigabit Ethernet are offset by Windows XP Home, only 512MB of RAM and the slowest processor and hard disk of the bunch.

The Acer Aspire SA20 is a machine built on a budget and it performs accordingly.

The Aspire is a very good unit with several features which enhance its usability. It will suit on-the-go entertainment and productivity, at a price that won't burn your wallet.

The Acer has all the bells and whistles you're going to need as a student, or mobile office worker; and then some.

When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.

The Acer Aspire has a lot of handy multimedia functions that help it work as a desktop replacement/media unit. One of the Aspire’s main selling points is the Arcade feature, which is a Windows Media Centre clone. A button on the notebook fascia opens Arcade, bypassing the Windows OS and enabling all media player functions: DVD, MP3 etc. It works quite well but isn’t as graphically stunning as MCE.

Acer have put together a well featured notebook at a great price, coming in over $300 lower than our price cap and offering a DVD burner and 2.8GHz P4 processor for maximum grunt.