Acer Aspire 3684NWXCi

The Aspire 3684NWXCi laptop is for value-conscious buyers. With a silver-and-black exterior, it looks quite presentable. Though slim in design, the Acer 3684 weighs in at 2.4 kg—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 M 440 at 1.86 GHz runs the laptop, and that’s partly responsible for the low price. The Aspire 3684 has 512 MB of DDR2 RAM—we’re all praise for Acer for being so generous! Having an 80 GB 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 2:18 hours—which is reasonable, but expect more time in real-world usage because our battery test is gruelling.

HD video playback (1080p WMV) is smooth. The widescreen 14.1 inch TFT renders sharp images with good contrast. Acer doesn’t miss out on connectivity options in this budget offering—you get wired and wireless networking as well as Bluetooth.

The 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 Rs 23,499, we think the Aspire gives local brands a run for their money. The lack of a proper OS is the only chink in its armour; otherwise, every thing seems to be on target for the value-conscious.

Specifications
Intel Celeron M440; 512 MB DDR2 533 MHz; 14.1-inch widescreen TFT; DVD/CD-RW Combo drive; 80 GB SATA hard disk; Dimensions: 14.3 x 10.8 x 1.3 (W x D x H) inches; Weight: 2.4 kg