Review: Acer Aspire 7520 Gemstone notebook computer

The latest notebook to come from Tesco is a spectacularly cheap Acer Aspire, the 7520 Gemstone, which clocks in at just £399.

The Aspire 7520 uses a graphics chip on the computer's motherboard, rather than using an add-in graphics card. This makes for slower graphics processing, and the fact that it also takes up a quarter of the computer's memory for graphics means that this computer slows down easily.

That showed when we tried the Acer Arcade, a set of programs for burning DVDs and similar tasks. It looks similar to Windows Media Center (which is also included), but the computer slowed to a crawl trying to draw all the good-looking screens on which Vista is so keen.

On the plus side, the 17in widescreen is very good, with clear, sharp images and good colours. It's a 'Crystalbrite' screen, which means it doesn't have an anti-glare coating. That improves the brightness and contrast, but at the expense of reflections – in bright light, it's susceptible to very distracting glare.

The large screen means the 7520 is a fairly large computer all round, although at 3.2kg it's not too heavy. It's well designed, with a curvy case, and a striking white interior contrasting with the black exterior.

There are four USB ports, as well as wired and wireless networking (but not Bluetooth), Firewire and an Express Card slot. It includes a VGA connection for an external monitor.

The PC comes with Acer's Empowering Technology software, accessed using the large e key at the top of the keyboard, which covers power and network management, among other things.

It also has a button to access the aforementioned Acer Arcade, the collection of video-editing programs which are reasonably useful, but not as much as Windows Media Center, which comes with Vista anyway.

While it's certainly cheap and it will do the job reasonably well if you're only interested in word processing, email and a little light web browsing, there are better deals available.

Then again, if you factor in an extra £50 or so for a memory upgrade, the Acer Aspire 7520 starts to look like a much better deal. It is on sale now, in Tesco stores and online at tesco.com.

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