Acer Travelmate 2424WXMi (Cel-M 380; 512MB/533, 80GB, 14.1 "TFT, WXP Home)

The Acer TravelMate 2424WXMi has a laptop for little money, he has therefore not all the gadgets and the latest generation of hardware but offers a decent laptop with key features without the wallet to do so. Much pain Key features include a 14 "screen ( 1280x800) that is not reflected as the new Crystal Bright screens. A dual layer DVD + R burner, 512MB DDR2 memory, a curved keyboard into a slim body with a weight of 2.35 kg (including battery, excluding AC adapter). Intel Celeron M 380 (1MB L2 cache, 1600MHz) and onboard video chip (with up to 128MB shared memory) are sufficient for most applications (except the last generation 3D games, if you want to be able to play all the games on your laptop you will need to look at another laptop). The memory of 512MB is sufficient and can be extended by a free memory slot. Although the hard drive running at 4200 RPM programs start fast, 80GB is enough for many documents, photos, videos and music. The laptop comes with Windows XP Professional, but a CD you will not find in the box. The operating system is installed on a separate rescue partition on the disk and is installed at the first boot. After the installation you will be prompted to stop the burner to backup. Rescue of the image to a blank DVD Which is very useful in case you rescue partition demolishes, or MBR in my case and therefore can not be booted. From the rescue partition with the rescue DVD full installation (with acer drivers and tools) can be put back on C: always automatically formatted FAT32 (the commando convert here without problems to create a NTFS partition, but it is a bit odd). As I indicated earlier, the hardware in this laptop unspectacular but also cause the laptop little noise and heat produced (which certainly making music is a relief compared with a fast desktop PC that sounds like an ascending jet). The battery is expensive reasonable, with WiFi on and the display and CPU saving mode, the laptop 2 + hours. I must admit that I do not really pay attention to how long he can stand it, but it also depends what you are doing (using CDROM, WiFi, USB devices). All in all I think it's a great laptop for the money and I miss the 3D hardware, Bluetooth and Firewire not.