The Travelmate TM4202 sits in the familiar Acer chassis; has a curved keyboard, rounded edges and a generally pleasant feel about it.

The 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 processor – a popular choice – is supported by 512MB of DDR Ram, which can be upgraded to 4GB.

While not setting our Labs alight with fast benchmark scores, considering it’s the cheapest laptop here it did very well; scoring 192 in Sysmark, which earned it third place on the podium.

Although its PCmark result of 2,647 was the lowest here, it will still outperform single-core notebooks running at the same clock speed.

Primarily designed as a business notebook, the TM4202 comes with the Intel 945GM integrated graphics chipset.

It can’t cope with 3D games and wouldn’t even run our 3Dmark or Far Cry frame rate tests, even though up to 224MB of system memory can be allocated to the graphics.

The 15.4in WXGA screen operates at a native resolution of 1,280 x 800 and is clear and bright. We've seen screens that are crisper, but it's good enough to watch DVDs and use Windows comfortably.

The smallish 60GB hard disk is about right for a notebook of this price, and the multiformat DVD writer is also par for the course.

At 2.7kg, the TM4202 is reasonably light, but its two hours, 45 minutes battery life won’t even get you from London to Liverpool.

Apart from some basic media software, Norton Antivirus and Acer’s bespoke ‘Empowering Technology’ applications, there’s not much else to write home about.

An S/PDIF socket resides on the front with other audio sockets and a Wifi radio switch, but along with the usual ports and connections, that’s about it.

In all, it’s a basic dual-core notebook that won’t win awards for speed but does a solid and admirable job.

This article is part of a group test on dual core notebooks: Other articles include:
Intro and Editor’s choice
Acer Travelmate TM4202
Evesham Voyager C550
Other reviews can be read via our PDF downloads above