Acer Ferrari 3200LMi

...Ferrari styled laptop – the Acer 3200. Sadly, unlike it motor counterpart, this laptop feels more like a Vauxnall Nova stuck in a Ferrari’s body.

==Design==
Design is this laptop’s strongest feature. It’s bright red exterior stands out and looks shiny and smooth, thanks to a scratch-resistant coating. The inside of the case is made from something known as silver-magniesium alloy, which not only sounds cool but is also quite ...
...situated in the bottom right corner of the lid. The keyboard is quite comfortable to use, as well as the touch pad, with a handy third navigational button for easy vertical and horizontal scrolling. The 15” screen is great and with a 1,400x1,050 resolution it’s crisp and bright. Being a serious laptop the 3200 boasts a wide array of ports, including a whopping 4 USB 2.0 ports on left side, as well as a PC Card slot, a Firewire port and the audio/mic ... more

I first saw this laptop in a PC magazine last year. It may have not been this exact model, but the radical Ferrari styling caught my eye and intrigued me. A couple of months ago a friend of mine, upset at the fact that he couldn’t afford a real Ferrari decided to settle down with a consolation purchase and get this Ferrari styled laptop – the Acer 3200. Sadly, unlike it motor counterpart, this laptop feels more like a Vauxnall Nova stuck in a Ferrari’s body.

Design

Design is this laptop’s strongest feature. It’s bright red exterior stands out and looks shiny and smooth, thanks to a scratch-resistant coating. The inside of the case is made from something known as silver-magniesium alloy, which not only sounds cool but is also quite strong (like Wolverine’s claws I’m guessing). Ferrari’s logo is subtly situated in the bottom right corner of the lid. The keyboard is quite comfortable to use, as well as the touch pad, with a handy third navigational button for easy vertical and horizontal scrolling. The 15” screen is great and with a 1,400x1,050 resolution it’s crisp and bright. Being a serious laptop the 3200 boasts a wide array of ports, including a whopping 4 USB 2.0 ports on left side, as well as a PC Card slot, a Firewire port and the audio/mic jacks. The right side boasts a smooth slot-based DVD+RW, which is a much better alternative to the flimsy and easily breakable tray. On the front the 3200 has a pair of speakers, the on/off buttons for WiFi and Bluetooth and an all-in-one card reader, which comes in handy for transferring your pictures from a digital camera. At the back you find a parallel, VGA, modem, S-Video and Ethernet ports.

Features

This laptop only comes in one configuration, unlike Dell for example, who let you customize your laptop. The 3200 runs an Athlon 64 2800+ processor (wouldn’t it make more sense to put a 3200+ in there, considering the name and all?) and boasts 512MB of RAM, 128MB ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 and a generous 80GB of hard drive space. Connectivity is quite extensive, with Wifi, Bluetooth and IrDa. The DVD-RW supports both DVD-R and DVD+R and burns DVDs quite fast.
The software package is pretty standard as the laptop come with Windows XP Pro, Microsoft Works and Softlink’s PowerDVD. That shouldn’t be an issue as any seasoned PC user will have copies of their favourite software already, but might be an issue for newbies.

Overall

Performance should have been a given, considering the laptop’s name and impressive specs. For some reason however it’s quite slow. I think it may have something to do with the fact that it runs an Athlon rather than a Pentium processor. I don’t mean to ignite huge debates over which CPU is better, but if this is the kind of performance one should expect from a fast Athlon Mobile CPU, maybe AMD should stick to making Desktop CPUs and leave the mobile market to Intel with their Pentium-M. This is a major let down, which leaves me thinking that this is nothing more than a pretty package with no real substance and no justification for having Ferrari’s proud name on its case. The battery life was a bit of a let down as well, as the laptop packed in after 2.5 hours of use. I’d rather stick with the more expensive, but lighting fast IBM Thinkpad T42.

RRP: £1499 

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