5. First Impressions Of The Acer Aspire 5672WLMi

At first sight, the sleek case of the Acer Aspire 5672WLMi is impressive. It includes attractive design details, such as a rippled surface above the keyboard and a brightly polished edge around the LCD display. But when handling many parts of its very flexible case - for example, around the card slots to the upper right - you can't help but notice that this is a mid-priced notebook. It's also somewhat irksome that it takes half an hour to load all the necessary programs and utilities during the first boot-up right after you unpack this machine.

Acer pairs up a 15.4" WXGA display with ATI's Mobility X1400 graphics processor and hyper memory (in principle, this is nothing more than a synonym for shared memory). That probably explains why the Aspire WLMi delivers the poorest graphics performance in our field of test candidates. A Core Duo T2300 processor and one gigabyte of DDR2 RAM is supposed to compensate for this disadvantage, but whether that actually does the trick or not is something you'll see later in this story.

Graphics Drivers: Internet Support

We updated the Acer Aspire 5672WLMi with driver version 8.231 from the Acer Website. At version 8.202, the driver that appears in the Pan America support region is a bit outdated. The newer driver version shows up in the European support region, but is still shown in English on that site.

There's no reference driver available on the ATI home page. There's also no support available for the Radeon X1x00 or Acer products available there, either.