Acer Travelmate 426LC
Acer's entry into our dream notebook review has a couple of things that make it noteworthy. For a start, it's the cheapest unit, by quite a long margin; AU$3,999 will net you a basic Travelmate 426LC, more than a thousand dollars cheaper than the next contender, the IBM Thinkpad T30.
Some of this relative budget status comes from the internal hardware used. The Travelmate 426LC is the only system in our roundup to use a desktop Pentium processor -- a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4, making it, in MHz terms at least, the fastest system in our roundup. The plus of having a desktop processor -- cheaper overall price -- does bring with it some drawbacks, however. For a start, desktop processors use more power than their notebook cousins, and this was amply demonstrated in the Travelmate 426LC's comparatively dismal battery life scores, where it consistently came last. This was most marked in the reader tests, where it piked out half an hour before its competition.
Physically the most striking thing about the Travelmate 426LC is the keyboard, which is arranged in a smile-like pattern, with the external keys most noticeably splayed outwards and upwards. Presumably this is for ergonomic reasons, but if you're used to more conventional keyboards, it will take some getting used to. Mouse control is via a fairly standard touchpad with some highly unusual buttons underneath it. We were somewhat irked by the mouse buttons underneath, which are quite large but quite unresponsive to go with it. Acer's forgone a rocker switch in favour of an unusual rocker circle. Again, it's an oddity that you'd have to get used to.
The Travelmate 420's 15" screen was quite acceptable and visible from quite a wide angle. Like most Acer notebooks, a feature of the Travelmate 426LC is an integrated secure digital slot. In the case of this notebook, it sits above the single PCMCIA slot. Like IBM, Acer's rather keen on corporate customers, and positions the SD slot as part of a complete security package.
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Power trip: Four high-end notebooks tested Introduction 1. Acer Travelmate 426LC 2. Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 3. IBM Thinkpad T30 4. Toshiba Satellite 5200 Benchmark results Specifications |
Ultimately the Travelmate 426LC isn't a bad notebook by any stretch of the imagination, but it is rather overshadowed by some of the powerhouses offered to us by other companies. At its current price, too, we were rather surprised to find that the notebooks in our budget notebooks coverage nipped at its heels in overall performance terms.
Acer Travelmate 426LC
Company: Acer Computer Australia
Price: AU$3,999
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 366 567
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