Acer TravelMate 291LCi

Acer's TravelMate 290 series -- we examined the 1.4GHz/512MB 291LCi model -- is one of the most handsome, versatile and long-lasting budget Centrino notebooks on the market. And while the £765 (ex. VAT) price may say mainstream notebook, many of the features scream thin-and-light system. For instance, you can swap media modules in the TravelMate 290 series, which you can't do with most mainstream notebooks. It also achieved extra-long battery life in our tests -- over 4.5 hours. Despite a few design letdowns, anyone on a tight budget should give it serious consideration.

Design
Although the TravelMate 290 series falls into the mainstream category, the system's case measures a trim 3.2cm thick and weighs 2.84kg without the AC adapter. The chassis is 33.4cm wide by 27.7cm deep, making room for a 15in. screen in a purplish-silvery, titanium-alloy lid. The dark-grey plastic base features a rubber shock absorber directly under the hard drive. The well-designed lid latch opens easily with one hand. Acer's big keyboard is a letdown. Unlike the mildly U-shaped, hand-friendly keyboards found on other Acer notebooks, the TravelMate 290 series features a straight one. It operates quietly, but sags under pressure and gives poor feedback. The important keys are large, as you'd expect for the chassis size, and the touchpad is also spacious and smooth, with two mouse buttons below it. There's no pointing stick. Icons and text appeared nice and big when displayed at the screen's native resolution of 1,024 by 768, but colours looked a bit washed out, especially reds and yellows. DVD movies surprised us when they made a slightly jerky start, even at two-thirds screen. Speaking of DVD movies, they load easily into the front-loading DVD drive. The swappable media bay can also hold a DVD-R/-RW burner -- a rare option on a budget notebook. Stereo speakers at the left and right corners of the front edge sound raspy when turned up high, but at a reasonable office volume they play speech and music clearly.

Features
Acer offers a number of preconfigured systems in the TravelMate 290 series (you can upgrade most of the components by contacting an Acer reseller). The 290 models come with a 1.3GHz Pentium M processor, while the 291 models have the 1.4GHz part; all come with integrated Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 802.11b wireless networking, making them official Centrino systems. Memory ranges from 256MB to 2GB of DDR 266 SDRAM, while media bay options include DVD/CD-RW, DVD-R/-RW, or a basic CD-ROM drive. Hard drives range from 30GB to 40GB. Unlike more expensive Acer notebooks, however, you won't find slots for flash memory cards. Our review system was the 291LCi model, with a 1.4GHz Pentium M, the 855GME integrated chipset, 512MB of RAM and a 40GB hard disk. The TravelMate 290 series offers plenty of ports and slots for the average user: there are three USB 2.0 ports, a single Type II PC Card slot, four-pin FireWire, parallel, Ethernet, modem, VGA/video-out, S-Video-out and infrared ports. There's no built-in floppy drive, but you can attach an external floppy via USB. The notebook ships with either the Windows XP Home or the XP Professional operating system. You also get a healthy mix of additional software, including Norton AntiVirus, Adobe Acrobat Reader, CyberLink PowerDVD XP 4.0, and NTI CD-Maker 6.0.

Performance & battery life
The TravelMate 291LCi is fast for a 1.4GHz Pentium M-based system, beating several nominally quicker Centrino notebooks that we've tested. The Intel 852GME Extreme Graphics Controller shares system memory, but surprisingly, this architecture did not hurt performance as much as we've seen in the past. When it comes to office and content-creation applications, the TravelMate 291LCi is one of the best mobile performers in its class. The TravelMate 291LCi lasted for more than 4.5 hours under battery power in desktop mode. Although this is 28 minutes short of the best battery life result we've seen from a Centrino system (Maxdata's Pro 7000X) it's still excellent. The system owes its impressive battery life to its power-efficient Pentium M processor and 14.8V, 4,300mAh (64WHr) battery. Combined with the performance result, this adds up to a very good set of benchmarks for a budget notebook. To measure mobile application performance and battery life, we use FutureMark's MobileMark 2002. MobileMark measures both application performance and battery life concurrently using a number of popular applications (Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator 6.0, WinZip Computing WinZip 8.0, McAfee VirusScan 5.13, Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 and Macromedia Flash 5.0).

Service & support
Acer backs the TravelMate 290 series with a one-year local warranty and one-year international traveller's warranty, plus free phone support for the duration of the warranty. After that, support calls cost 50p per minute. For more extensive warranty options, you'll need to investigate the paid-for Acer Advantage service. Acer's Web site also offers free technical support via email, along with driver downloads, user manuals, a short list of FAQs and some technical papers.

Specifications