ACER ASPIRE 1640 SHORT REVIEW
| Screen Quality | 8.2/10  |
|---|---|
| Battery Life | 3.4/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7.8/10 |
| Value for money | 5.8/10 |
| Overall value | 6.4/10 |
Acer's Aspire 1640 has been on the market for some time it is far from showing signs of its age.
Boasting a 15.4" wide-screen LCD with a native resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, the Acer dwarfs all the other notebooks in terms of screen real estate. As display quality goes too, it's clearly one of the best here, with vibrant colour reproduction and wide-viewing angles. We couldn't spot much ghosting either when watching fast moving videos, making the Acer an excellent choice for users who plan being visually entertained whilst on the move.
With a battery life of two hours and 20 minutes - the highest in this test - you should also be able to watch a full movie without frustration. As a machine for application work, the Acer is even more impressive, in that its PCMark 2005 CPU and memory scores of 3011 and 2738 were the best in this grouptest. Its hard drive score of 2804 was also quite speedy.
As a gaming machine, the 1640 scored 960 and 259 in 3DMark 2003 and 2005. Serious Sam on the other hand finished with a frame rate of 37.3fps, all of which places the Acer second in terms of gaming performance.
The fast performance numbers come courtesy of a 1.86GHz Pentium M processor that's backed up nicely by 1Gbyte of RAM. The only thing really missing from the Acer's equation is built-in Firewire support to go with its three USB ports.