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

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

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.

The first Dothan notebook to roll off the rank, we were interested to see exactly how much real-world gain Intel is offering in its revised Centrino platform.

It’s an odd gambit business-wise: align your own brand with that of another. But for Acer, the one-off team-up with Ferrari to brand and produce the Acer Ferrari 3000 notebook has resulted in a stunning product.

Acer’s tiny new Tablet PC, the TravelMate C111 marries the functionality of their previous convertible tablet with the low-power high-performance functionality of the Intel Centrino.

This is not the first 'desknote' that we've reviewed (see Protac DeskNote, June 2002, page 37) but in our estimation the Aspire 1703SC is the first system that truly expounds the virtues of true desknote-ism.

Acer has taken a different tack to IBM with its version of Centrino. Whereas the ThinkPad focused on being small and portable, the TravelMate 800 is a better-featured notebook with a 1.6GHz processor, 15in display and a fast graphics chip

Acer was one of the few big name manufacturers that were able to meet our stringent pricing criteria. The submitted notebook, the TravelMate, is not a so bad overall, but it couldn't win out against the smaller manufacturer's abilities to get top components at short notice. Where Acer excels is in after-sales support.