Acer Aspire 3684NWXCi : Good for the Price

The Acer Aspire 3684NWXCi laptop is for value conscious buyers. With a silver and black exterior, it looks quite presentable. Though slim and design, the Acer 3684 weights in at 2.4kg – moderately heavy.
Ergonomically speaking, the keyboard is well laid out, however, the keystrokes are bit hard, touch typists should try it before deciding to buy it.
An Intel Celeron M440 at 1.86 GHz runs the laptop, and that’s partly responsible for the low price. The Aspire 3684 has 512MB of DDR2 RAM – we’re all praise for Acer for being so generous! Having an 80GB Hard Drive with a combo DVD/CD drive is praiseworthy., considering the price.
In PC Mark 05 – a synthetic test that measures overall system performance – performance was decent; the score was 2121, good for a budget category laptop. 388 points in 3D Mark 06 means the laptop is good enough for games like Quake 3, Counterstrike: Source, and Call of Duty. Our real world tests revealed enough power to multi-task between regular applications such as media players, word processing applications, browsers, etc.
The Six cell Li-ion battery pack managed to power the Aspire 3684 for 2 hours and 18 minutes which is reasonable, but expect more time in real world usage because our battery test is grueling.
HD video playback (1080p WMV) is smooth. The wide screen 14.1 inch TFT renders sharp images with good contrasts. Acer doesn’t miss out on connectivity option in this budget offering – you get wired and wireless networking as well as bluetooth.
The Acer Aspire 3684 comes pre loaded with Linpus Linux, which has a command line interface, thankfully, Acer does bundle Windows XP and Vista drivers alongside just in case you feel like installing (an original copy of ) Windows.
Priced at $549, we think the Aspire gives other brands a run for their money. The lack of a proper OS is the only chink in its armour; otherwise, everything seems to be on target for the value conscious.

Specification at a Glance:
CPU : Intel Celeron M440
RAM : 512MB DDR2 533MHz
Monitor : 14.1 inch widescreen TFT
Optical Drives : DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive
Hard Drive : 80GB SATA hard disk
Dimensions : 14.3×10.8×1.3 (WxDxH) inches.
Weight : 2.4 KG

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