The Travelmate 3273WXMi is the latest entry in Acer's range of notebooks aimed primarily at business users.

Its robust, silver chassis gives a good first impression, but open it up and things start to look slightly less spectacular.

Inside is a large, unattractive dark grey plastic bezel surrounding the 14.1in screen which serves as an instant reminder to the notebook's budget nature.

Four customisable shortcut buttons sit at the top left of the keyboard, while at the front you'll find audio ports and switches to quickly turn off Bluetooth and Wifi. A DVD writer is located on the right.

The left side of the chassis is home to a PC Card slot and a reader that caters for SD, MMC, Xd Picturecard and Sony Memorysticks. A large vent is also situated here and, even with the notebook sitting idle, the fan seemed happy to whir away continuously during testing. Generally, the noise emitted will only be audible in a quiet room, but when the notebooks gets slightly hotter under the collar you'll certainly notice it.

In typical Acer fashion, the keyboard has a slight curve to it, with the aim being to make it more ergonomic. During use, it flexes a little too much for our liking and, although by no means awful, a firmer keyboard would make for a more comfortable typing experience. The large, widescreen design of the touchpad matches the screen, but it could do with a textured surface to aid accuracy.

Despite the relatively low £616 price tag, Acer has managed to fit the Travelmate 3273WXMi with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. The T5500 CPU runs at 1.66GHz, which is the slowest in the standard notebook Core 2 Duo line-up, but it's supplied with 1GB of Ram and provides enough grunt for most tasks.

In our performance tests, it clocked up 224 in Sysmark 2004 SE, which is about what we expected.

Weighing in at 2.4kg and with its 14.1in screen, the Travelmate 3273WXMi was never going to be the most portable of computers. As expected, the battery struggles to reach two hours during normal use.

If you crank the screen brightness down and turn off both Wifi and Bluetooth you'll be able to squeeze more out of the six-cell battery, but more than three hours is optimistic. A nice touch is the ePower Management application; part Acer's Empowering Technology software, it indicates how long the notebook will last switched on, when in standby mode or, alternatively, when hibernated.

Graphics are catered for by Intel's 945GM integrated chipset, which dynamically steals memory from the 1GB of system Ram. Solitaire and Minesweeper won't cause it any problems, but don't expect to play any 3D games.

The display has a 1,280x800 resolution, which offers a decent amount of desktop space. In an effort to keep the price down Acer has decided against giving it the glossy Crystalbrite treatment. This is fine for everyday use and keeps reflections to a minimum, but when playing DVDs it doesn't look so hot and the display looks a little washed out.

Although it would have no problems running Vista, XP Professional is the chosen operating system - considering the notebook is designed for businesses this is no huge surprise. Cyberlink PowerDVD, NTI CD-Maker, a 90-day trial of Norton Antivirus and a host of Acer tools make up the rest of the software collection.

Its performance won't knock your socks off, but the Travelmate 3273WXMi is a solid notebook at a good price. Acer could have done a better job with the warranty though - a one-year collect and return deal isn't great.