Acer 1200

I wouldn't recommend this Acer 1200 to a friend.

The Acer 1200 has been a good investment. It's very useful in many cases; it's good for working, for playing or for 'surfing' on the net. Fast processor and excellent screen. The only problem I find with it is the fan sound.. It's very annoying after a while. Except for that, the laptop is very useful and there is a small chance that it will fail you..

When my Acer 1200 Laptop arrived I thought I had a bargain. £1056 for a laptop with a 1.3G Pentium, 256Mb Ram and a DVD/CDr combo drive. And indeed it is. A good price for a good laptop.

The box is stylish and the handy controls on the front of laptop all make the first visual impression an impressive one. However, once I started to actually use the PC I did find a few niggles and the list of niggles has grown.

I had bought the machine primarily because I am going to university soon and it seemed like a really good idea for word processing and keeping files in order. But the firewire socket was a good addition for me because I love editing and my Sony DV camera plugs straight into the back of the Acer.

The Acer can handle (albeit only just handle) the large Avi files created by 'Premier 6' but every now and then the screen goes black and after a few seconds it comes back. This problem isn't just confined to 'Premier'. The Acer does this with Flash MX too and any other graphic intensive application which is extremely annoying and leaves me with sense of impending doom (when the screen goes black, I sometimes wonder if it may not come back!).

As well the graphic issues the Acer also tends to be a bit slow despite it 1.3g processor and 256Mb or ram which is hard to explain away. Poor mother board? Poor Graphics card? Cheap Celeron chip? Not sure, but having used various PCs with similar spec I can't help feeling a little short changed.

As well as performance there are two physical things that niggle me about the Acer. Firstly it is the lack of an infra-red port. My poor Ericsson mobile phone has nothing to talk to now, and if I want to synch my phone to the PC then I can use WAP (huh..great) and thats it! Bad oversight on Acers part. Give me a firewire socket but no infrared socket?!?

The second gripe I have is with the DC in socket. It is right next to two USB ports and a serial port which means I have swivel the DC connector around or even unplug it to get a USB device connected. Bad planning!

Finally, there is some good news. The S-Video out socket means I can now watch DVDs and downloaded DivX movies on my TV. The pictures appear in a framed black box for some reason (and this loses a few inches around the picture), but this doesn't worry me too much. Being S-video, the picture is crisp, flicker free and clear as a bell.

Overall the Acer is disappointing only because it is such a high spec machine that delivers slightly stunted performace more in line with it's price rather than specification.

The performance is just not what I would expect for list of features. However, if you forget the spec and focus on the price, then it performs admirably! It does a very good job indeed for £1056, and even though I have had it for four months now, there isn't a laptop out there on the high street which seems better for the money. So well done Acer basically, just tell everyone its a 486 and let them be really impressed instead of disappointed with 1.3g Pentium!