Laptops Arena

We think that Acer is a brand that deserves much more attention than they are getting. In this article you are going to read some Acer notebook reviews just to see if these notebooks can complete with those well known brands like Dell or HP.

One thing is for sure, the guys at Acer can sure deliver you a machine that will make you feel unique. For instance, we have the Acer Ferrari line. If you can't afford the car, at least buy the notebook. Since AMD and Acer are both sponsors of the Scuderia Ferrari racing team, they worked together to bring you a stylish and powerful notebook. The 12.1 inch notebook is colored in a furious black with red lines and is bound to put you in the center of attention when you pull it out of your bag. When you buy the Ferarri 1000 you will be astonished of the content of the box. It's more than any Christmas gift. Besides the usual power cord you get a lot of cool accessories and useful things for your laptop. You get two batteries (6-cell plus 3-cell), a Bluetooth Ferrari mouse, a Bluetooth VOIP card, a RJ11 modem cable, a Faux Leather optical drive case, mouse case and netbook case and even a micro fiber cloth with the Acer logo.

The lid of this notebook is covered in carbon fiber and in the center you will find the Ferrari logo. The keyboard has smaller keys and we didn't like that some keys were missing but sacrifices need to be made in order to produce such a small and compact laptop. One thing we found really cook about this laptop is the Ferrari pedal design of the left and right mouse buttons. This just goes to show you that when Acer wanted to develop a Ferrari notebook, they went all the way with the details. Even if we some multimedia control button would have been nice, Acer has some quick launch buttons that can be programmed to run the application you desire. Just like most Acer models, this one also has the useful set of indicator lights with the usual green (ON) and orange (SLEEP) colors. And there is also a blue indicator for the Bluetooth device. As for the speakers, it's fair to say that the sound is good even if the speakers are quite small. You get all the usual number of ports and connections (which are quite enough considering the size of the notebook): 3 USB ports, one Ethernet port, a FireWire port, a VGA port, one 56K modem port plus the usual headphone and microphone jacks. You also get integrated Bluetooth and Infrared devices.

The Acer Ferrari 1000 notebook also has a webcam or, as Acer likes to call it, an "Orbicam". This particular webcam is very neat because you can actually turn it around 180 degrees so that it faces the people behind the laptop. This 1.3 mega pixel integrated webcam is bound to produce some quality images, both clear and sharp and with the help of the special software you can add a plus of creativity in your free time. This notebook weighs around 4 pounds, so carry it around with you should not be a problem (if you don't, how else are you going to show your friends just what a cool gadget you have?). There is only problem. Even if the Ferrari 1000 is not small enough to be considered a netbook, it still lacks an optical drive so you need to carry an external one around with you. This is not that big of a deal, since nowadays most files are stored on memory cards or memory sticks. You can just keep that external optical drive for home usage. Unfortunately, this notebook heats up just like a Ferrari. Even if the fan does not produce any kind of upsetting and exaggerated noise, you will feel the bottom of the notebook heating up by the minute. Those who like to play games are advised to take extra measures before anything in that notebook starts to... melt. The batteries are not that great (none of them). The 3-cell battery will only last a bit over 1 hour so there is pretty much nothing you could do with it. The 6-cell battery will provide a bit over 2 hours of use but this is not that great either since the notebook was designed at such dimensions as it was made to be portable and now these 2 batteries kind of ruin the whole concept.



We were happy to see that there were not tones of useless programs installed on this notebook. The Acer ePower management is not something we would recommend you delete because you can use it to turn off some devices and this will help you save up some battery life. You can also customize some power profile schemes and then access them by a simple push of a button. The processor is an AMD Turion X2 TL-60 - Dual Core with 4 GB of RAM and an integrated ATI Express 1150 graphics card. The 500 GB of available disk space should be more than enough to bundle up your notebook with all kinds of movies, pictures, music, games and software so free space is definitely not something you will be craving for anymore.



We really like the Acer Ferrari 1000 notebook because you get all sorts of goodies you didn't ask for but which can come very in handy. We did not expect such good performance in a small and compact notebook but Acer has amazed us in times when we rarely become amazed anymore. Even if it lacks an integrated optical drive, Acer gives you an external one so you don't have to spend any more money. Plus you have a 5-in-1 card reader to help you with your file transfers. We are not going to lie, this notebook is expensive (a bit less than $2000) but we like it even if it has that heat issue (which we've found in a lot of laptop models from different manufacturers) and battery life could be better, who knows? Maybe Acer will come up with a 9-cell battery just to take care of this problem. The truth is, this notebook really lives up to the Ferrari name and logo, it's a power horse with an elegant look, expensive but fully-optioned.