Acer TravelMate 602TER

WHAT'S HOT: With impressively long battery life, a large set of optional add-ins, and a top-flight keyboard, the handsome, magnesium-clad TravelMate stands out as one of the best all-around travel notebooks. The TravelMate measures only 11.7 inches wide by 9.5 inches deep by 1.4 inches thick. In our battery tests it ran for 4.3 hours on one charge. With a second battery ($149 extra) in the modular bay, you might expect to compute without plugging into a wall socket all day. (We did not test this.)

The TravelMate's bay accommodates one of five other devices, including the bundled CD-RW drive, a $300 6X DVD-ROM drive, a $359 12GB hard drive, or a $240 CD-ROM drive. With a weight saver in the bay, the TravelMate weighs only 4.7 pounds. Most remarkable may be the keyboard, which rivals a ThinkPad's for comfort. If sinking your fingers into goose down describes your ideal typing experience, the TravelMate's keyboard delivers with incredibly soft, soundless action.

WHAT'S NOT: Although Acer pitches the TravelMate's standard CD-RW drive as the perfect floppy drive replacement, we're not convinced CDs deserve to inherit the floppy's mantle just yet. Burning to a CD-R is overkill for sharing one or two files, older CD-ROM drives can't read CD-RW discs, and in general, few other users will be able to reciprocate unless a company chooses to standardize on this laptop. Consumers will almost certainly want Acer's Universal Serial Bus floppy drive, which adds $99. You'll also have to keep track of an extra piece of equipment to print from the TravelMate. To save case space, Acer eliminated standard, built-in parallel and serial connections, and put them at the split ends of a short cable that plugs into the port-replicator connection.

WHAT ELSE: Aside from the missing built-in parallel and serial connections, the TravelMate offers one of the most complete designs of the light notebooks we've examined. Like all TravelMates, it sports a screen notch for attaching Acer's $99 USB video camera. It comes with only one PC Card slot, but modem and network jacks are built in. The TravelMate also offers two USB ports and a handy business card sleeve on the bottom. Storage and memory are user-upgradable. The audio ports, along with the lockable power switch, are conveniently located in the front of the gray case in a handsome silver faceplate. The TravelMate 602TER turned in an average performance for a Pentium III-650/500. It ships with Microsoft Works 2000; disc creation software and one CD-RW disc; and IBM's Via Voice voice-recognition package, including headphones and an external microphone. Documentation includes a nice electronic manual.

BEST USE: Companies ready to ditch floppies for rewritable discs will most appreciate the TravelMate 602TER, a compact, nicely designed, and reasonably priced travel notebook with a terrific keyboard and long battery life.

SUMMARY

Acer TravelMate 602TER PC WorldBench 2000 score of 127, Pentium III-650/500, 128MB of SDRAM, Windows 98 SE, 13.3-inch active screen, 8MB of video memory, 12GB hard drive, 4X/2X/20X CD-RW drive, built-in modem, built-in network card, touchpad pointing device, 6.7-pound travel weight, Microsoft Works 2000. 1-year parts warranty, 1-year labor warranty; 24/7 toll-free support. $2400 800/733-2237 www.acer.com/aac