Acer Aspire 9500

Entertainment notebooks usually come in two sizes: large and very large. Acer’s Aspire 9500 breaks that mold with a slim 17-inch footprint that you can take on the road. It’s a very good machine for watching DVDs, listening to music, and even watching and recording TV. The system’s high-end hardware will make any multimedia maven happy.

For a 17-inch laptop, the Aspire 9500 favors a slim-and-sexy appearance over a fat all-in-one approach. A gunmetal silver-and-black exterior masks a tight form factor, which is uniquely possible for a Taiwanese manufacturer like Acer because it actually designs and builds its own notebooks, from the BIOS to the motherboards. The effort has paid off with a large notebook that’s 1.5-inches tall and weighs only 8.4 pounds.

The prime function of the Aspire is entertainment, which it can do well. The glossy 17-inch LCD supports a WXGA+ resolution of up to 1440 x 900 pixels. DVD video playback looks flawless thanks to ATI’s Mobility Radeon X700 graphics processor, and this system’s 3DMark03 score of 6,126 means that all but the most hard core gamers will be satisfied with the 9500’s performance when playing 3D titles. 

When it comes to productivity performance, the Aspire 9500 blazes through most chores, thanks to a 2-GHz Pentium M processor and a whopping 2GB of RAM. In fact, this notebook’s MobileMark 2005 score of 251 is as high as what some dual-core notebooks turned in for this month’s cover story.

With the Wi-Fi radio turned off, the 9500 lasted for well over three hours unplugged, which is a good runtime for a desktop replacement system. The test did not run successfully with Wi-Fi on.

The entertainment software is headlined by Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition, which simplifies the entire experience of creating a music library, collecting and organizing digital photos, or watching a DVD with the ease of pushing a button. The OS is a definite bonus for neophytes who don’t like to wade through six different programs to look at their photos. Media Center dovetails nicely with the Aspire’s integrated TV tuner; for those intimidated by the thought of setting up TV on a computer, the MCE makes everything idiot-proof.

The design, functionality, and software of the Aspire 9500 are all good enough to demand your attention when shopping for a large entertainment notebook, but it’s disappointing that Acer has forgone instant-on capability here, especially considering it has total control over the BIOS and motherboard. It’s not a deal breaker, but it is a bummer.

Besides that omission, the Aspire 9500 gets a lot of little things right. Two rows of quick buttons allow you to easily access Media Center, Internet, e-mail, and other commonly used applications. On/Off buttons for both 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth help extend the battery life, so you don’t needlessly drain the power with unused wireless radios.

A 5-in-1 memory card reader joins DVI and S-Video ports on the rear. Another small improvement is the choice of a slot-loading optical drive over the traditional ejection tray; in other words, the CD/DVD drive “sucks in” discs automatically so you’ll never break another ejection tray.

Acer does not have a large presence in North America, and customer support is limited to telephone and e-mail channels, which are often difficult to locate on Acer’s Web site. However, the company is making inroads into major retail chains like Circuit City, so you’re not limited  to blindly buying its notebooks over the Internet.

Overall, the Acer Aspire 9500 is an excellent notebook for entertainment enthusiasts who’d rather have a manageable size and weight over a behemoth that tries to do too much. It’s, ahem, something to aspire to.