Acer TravelMate 5320-101G12Mi - Celeron M 540 1.86 GHz - 15.4" TFT > Reviews > £350 for a great laptop, what a buy

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Average
Look & Feel	Poor
Comfort & Portability	Good
Robustness & Durability	Excellent
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	very cheap
Disadvantages:	could be faster, and better designed

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

For all of you who aren’t familiar with the brand acer, they are now the best selling brand of laptop manufacture in the UK at the moment. This is simply because they offer good laptops that satisfies everyone’s demands as they do such a wide range of laptops, ones for home use, for business use and ones for multimedia use, you name it and it’s a pretty sure certainty that acer do the laptop you want. They also offer all this at incredibly reasonable prices which is the real reason why their the best selling manufacturer for laptops at the moment as a lot of people need a good laptop but at a tight budget.

Now I wouldn’t say that this laptop is stylish however it has improved quite a lot from acers older travel mate design, you can now see that they are at least trying to make somewhat of an effort in designing the laptop. One thing I don’t know why they do is never experiment with other colours and for every travel mate they do they always seem to keep the boring black colour all over their laptop. Perhaps they think because its for business men then they want a simple and boring looking laptop, but I wouldn’t want this so I cant see why anyone else would.
Apart from the boring dull black colour the design is a lot better than it used to be, its certainly shed a bit of weight of that body and now looks quite sleek and thin is places compared to when it was just a huge slab of rectangular plastic.

Its not the fastest of laptops either but if you are on a tight budget of around £350 then its 1 gb is certainly more than just good value, its fast enough to do most things on however if you are wanting to play games then this laptop just really isn’t up to it at all. It can be upgraded to 4gb at maximum which is a little strange to see on an acer travel mate as they usually offer up to 4gb expansion but then again another 1gb of ram certainly wouldn’t go a miss and would definitely make it go a lot faster.

This laptop has a nice 120 gb hard drive built into it. I think this is reasonable and will be more than enough for most peoples needs, but even if you do need more space you could easily connect a portable hard drive to one of its 4 Hi-Speed USB ports. Or you could even store data onto memory cards by using its great built in 5 in 1 card reader which supports any of, SD Memory Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard, xD-Picture Cards. Considering the low price of £350 120gb of hard drive is well above this price and you would usually be looking at about £500 for something like that, also a card reader is another great extra thrown in there at what looks like no extra cost.

This laptop has a 15.4 inch tft screen, this screen is also active matrix, this is being used by so much more laptop manufacturers nowadays as it makes the screen lighter, therefore making the laptop lighter, is makes the image quality so much better than a normal TFT screen and it also makes the response time a lot better, which makes videos look sharper, photos look sharper and game playing look better than ever before.

I would have liked to see it have a 17 inch screen, though I suppose business men are bothered about how much battery life they can get, rather than how good the video watching capabilities are.
So this laptop can run for a great 3 hours which would have been cut hugely if it was to have an 17 inch screen size.

The laptop isn’t too heavy to be carrying around, it weighs in at 2.9 kg which I suppose is about the average for a laptop, and I think if you was thinking of buying a laptop you need to take with you a lot then you should probably think about getting a lighter one as this, after a while would start to ache your arm.

This is a fantastic laptop for its price, sure there’s better ones out there, ones which will last longer and run faster as well as be a lot lighter, but you cant get a laptop with all this capability nd quite high spec for the ultra low price of just £350 so if your on a tight budget and need a laptop to get you going, then this is a good buy.