Acer Aspire AS9300-5005 Notebook (1.6GHz Turion 64 X2, 1GB DDR2, 120GB, DVDA?RW DL, Windows Vista Home Premium, 17" LCD)

The first thing you notice when you open the notebook is its integrated Webcam, center-mounted in a big silver frame in the lid. The Webcam can rotate 225 degrees to shoot both in front of and behind the screen. Connections include four USB ports, an SD slot, a PC Card slot, and even a front-mounted S/PDIF port for accommodating the latest external speakers. The hard drive has a generous 120GB capacity.

The 9300-5005's sound and speed left us wishing for more, though. The speakers, partially exposed in the wrist rest when the lid is closed, delivered mediocre output.

The laptop earned a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 48, at least 40 percent behind recent top performing notebooks on business applications. Nevertheless, it played DVD movies smoothly--and can burn discs in its dual-layer DVD writer slowly but surely. The 3D games in our tests were unplayable, however--jerking or stopping dead in their tracks.

On the positive side, the Acer's powerful 4800-milliamp battery lasted 3.5 hours, far above average for a desktop replacement's battery life.

When you factor in the cost of another 1GB of RAM to goose the system's speed, and of even a basic set of productivity apps such as Microsoft Works 8.5, it becomes clear that the 9300-5005 isn't quite a $949 notebook after all. But if you can live without some or all of these options, it's a very good deal.

Carla Thornton