It would, of course, be unfair to judge a notebook by its cover so we will look past the Acer Aspire 5101 AWLMi’s slightly crude silver-with-black-bits outer shell. It’s not ugly exactly, but the Aspire’s beauty is definitely on the inside.

Lift the lid and you are presented with a high-quality 15.4in screen. Acer’s Crystalbrite display certainly looks crisp and has a strong contrast, although the panel’s gloss finish is ever so slightly reflective, which could be a problem in bright artificial lighting conditions.

Interestingly, the Aspire runs Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, rather than XP Home. This means that you can take advantage of the screen by playing DVDs, movies and TV on it. At least you could if a TV tuner was included. Unfortunately, you’ll have to buy one if you want to make use of Windows Media Center’s PVR live pause and timeshift TV recording functions.

The Aspire did pretty well in our performance tests, coming out near the top in everything apart from battery life. As with all of the notebooks in this test, the Aspire’s graphics capabilities are insufficient to play the latest games, but that’s not a flaw deserving of criticism in this price range.

For everything else, however, the Aspire 5101 is a very capable PC. It was easy to set up, features all the connectivity you’ll probably ever need (including three USB sockets, a five-in-one memory card reader and a PC card slot) and includes a multi-format DVD writer to boot. The cherry on the cake is a built-in webcam above the screen for making video phone calls and for instant messaging.

This article is part of a group test of budget notebooks.
The table can be read via our Pdf download.
Others are:
Asus A6Rp-AP026H
Fujitsu Siemens Amilio Pi 1505
Hi-grade Notino W5600
MSI Megabook M670
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120