A series of desktop replacement laptops that won't stress your pocketbook, Acer's Aspire 9300 laptop computers start out very nicely equipped at a great price of $900.

This baseline price tag includes a 17-inch widescreen display that gives you the viewing room of a respectable desktop computer LCD. This screen is great for watching DVDs or having multiple applications open at once, with the sharpness of 1440 by 900 resolution and the built-in GridVista that automatically resizes apps to fit into different tiered formations.

The large screen leaves room for a full-sized keyboard, and Acer even includes a number pad alongside it. Typing was comfortable and felt as natural as using a traditional desktop keyboard.

At the top of the screen, Acer has built in their OrbiCam webcam, making these laptops ready for videoconferencing or video chatting right out of the box. It's not the sharpest webcam on the market, but it's a decent camera that's integrated and can even be rotated around so you can record video or still pictures away from the screen.

It's not a thundering powerhouse, but the 1.6GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 processor works well enough for most applications and the dual-core nature of the CPU boosts multitasking. Acer starts the 9300 out with 1GB of 533MHz of RAM, although these laptops support up to 4GB so there's lots of room to add more later.

Storage space starts out at a reasonable 120GB, so you'll have a good amount of room for application installs and multimedia file storage. These laptops also ship with DVD writers at the baseline price. And these drives not only support traditional DVD and CD media, they also burn to high capacity 8.5GB Dual Layer media and DVD-RAM disks that can be rewritten to up to 100,000 times.

The onboard graphics chip is NVIDIA's GeForce Go 7300 featuring 128MB of dedicated video memory. This provides a nice boost to 3D gaming and light CAD graphics work.

Communication includes 802.11b/g wireless and gigabit Ethernet, so you can hook up to the high-speed corporate network without any fear of bottlenecking. And the Bluetooth connectivity allows you to synch up to your PDA or cell phone without wires as well. These laptops also include a 5-in-1 media card reader, letting you transfer files and photos from a compatible PDA or digital camera easily.

Battery life was not too bad, with these laptops lasting around two and a half hours before needing a recharge. The main drawback with desktop replacement systems is their heaviness, and that's an issue with the Aspire 9300 as well. The system itself weighs over eight pounds and the power cord adds another pound as well, so these aren't laptops that you'll port around without effort.

But if price and screen size are your main concerns, the Acer Aspire 9300 laptop computer line offers plenty of the latter without having to pay too much of the former.


Pro: Nice price, great display
Con: Very heavy

Warranty
1-year limited