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With its large screen and keyboard, good sound quality and blu-ray playback, Acer is certainly offering a lot of machine for the money with its Apsire 8920.
As laptops go, it's big. It needs to be to cater for the 18.4-inch screen under its stiff, heavy lid. All this size makes significantly heavy - the Aspire weighs 4.2kg, more than two and a half times the lightest full-sized laptop in our test. You probably wouldn't want to be lugging it around or resting it on your lap for too long.
It was one of the fastest at carrying out the everyday tasks we set it, too. With the latest draft-n Wi-Fi connectivity, the Aspire's wireless data transfer was slick, as well, although as with all the laptops on test, the speed of transfer dropped off significantly when we moved two rooms away from our test wireless router.
The huge screen is let down slightly by uneven backlighting. It's a glossy screen so, as with others of this type, you can expect screen reflections.
We found that the keyboard is spongy and bendy, and it's also quite dark and difficult to read - but we liked the extra numeric keypad that you don't find on smaller laptops. Despite its size, the Aspire's touch pad is small. It works fine though, and is easy to use.
We were really impressed with the Aspire's built-in speakers. Typically, laptop speakers deliver poor sound but these are good. We found that speech playback is clean and clear and the treble and bass notes sound good. The Aspire boasts another rarity in laptops in this price bracket - a Blu-ray player that can be used to watch high-definition movies on Blu-ray discs.
The Aspire comes with good documentation but the laptop's ports are labelled with raised black lettering that, on the black casing, makes them hard to read.
Battery life isn't great - about an hour and three quarters when playing a DVD, around two and a half hours if you're using the wireless connection
Pros: Big screen, big keyboard, Blu-ray playback
Cons: Portability-limiting weight, keyboard is hard to read and spongy
