Acer Aspire 5536

As the reader comments in any netbook review will tell you, it’s possible to buy a fully-fledged laptop for the same price as some Intel Atom-powered portables. Such complaints miss the point a little — netbooks have never been about performance, but about providing go-anywhere access to basic applications that would otherwise require an expensive ultraportable — but not completely. The question is if you’ve only got £400 to spend on a portable and don’t fancy a netbook, what kid of laptop can you buy?

One answer is the Acer Aspire 5536. At £430, it’s priced along the same lines as the high-end netbooks that attract so much reader ire, but this is a 15.6in laptop with a solid mid-range specification. So, is it any good?

Despite the comparatively low price, the Acer Aspire 5536 at least looks like a million dollars. The glossy blue lid contrasts nicely with the grey plastic on the interior and the overall proportions are pleasing. The case feels solid too, and while there is a bit too much give in the middle of the lid for our liking, this isn’t really a problem — at 2.8kg, this isn’t a laptop that’s going to be carried around that much.

In fact the Acer Aspire 5536’s dimensions nudge it out of straight laptop and into desktop replacement territory. Its 15.6in screen may fall well short of the 17in displays on the more serious — and expensive — models in this category, but at 16:9, it’s wider than that of most laptops at this size. The catch is that the screen’s native resolution is a mere 1366 x 768, but that’s plenty of room to run a couple of applications side-by-side.

Acer reckons the screen is a better match for widescreen movie content than the more usual 16:10 laptop screens and while this may be so (at least for 16:9 movies), the Aspire 5536 isn’t ideally suited to home entertainment in this base model form. There’s no Blu-ray drive for playing HD (though it is an option and HDMI is standard) and the built-in speakers are tinny at best, despite the ‘Dolby Home Theatre’ branding.

The widescreen display does have the side-effect of making the Acer Aspire 5536 a rather wide laptop (283mm) though, and this means that there’s room for a full-size keyboard with a separate numeric keyboard. The wide, flat keys are comfortable to use, although the ample space beneath each one will act as a dust trap — not a complaint, just something to watch out for.

The trackpad is equally striking — it’s just a smooth, depressed area in the middle of the textured wrist rest with a single, low-profile button. The lack of demarcation between the pad and the button can lead to the annoying problem of your button-clicking finger accidentally moving the mouse pointer, but it’s not a big deal. There is a button next to the trackpad to disable it completely, but this drastic step is probably best left for when an external mouse is connected.

The Acer Aspire 5536’s 2.1GHz Athlon 64 X2 QL-64 processor is a reasonable performer at this price. It’s no Core 2 Duo, but it is at least dual-core and can easily cope with the kind of tasks that home and small business users are likely to use it for. 3Gb of RAM is fine at this price, too — although the laptop can contain up to 8Gb, the 32-bit version of Windows Vista wastes anything more than 3Gb.

Sadly, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200 3D graphics chip isn’t as impressive as it sounds. It’s certainly capable of more than the usual budget offering of integrated Intel graphics, they’re not enough for this laptop to lend itself to anything more than very lightweight (and low resolution) 3D gaming. Oh, and battery life..? Few laptops of this size are up to much away from the mains, but the Acer Aspire 5536 should be good for around a couple of hours of writing and web browsing in the garden.

If you’re buying on budget and want a laptop for use as a main computer at home rather than one you can carry anywhere, then the Acer Aspire 5536 is certainly worth considering. Its shortcomings — namely the limited vertical resolution of the screen and weak 3D graphics performance — are really the result of cost-cutting rather than corner-cutting by ASUS, and are unlikely to bother anyone looking for a general purpose PC. It’s certainly a much more capable computer than any netbook, but it’s nowhere near as portable, so make sure you know what you need from your notebook before opening your wallet.