11. Touchpad And Keyboard

The touchpad features very accurate cursor controls as well as a vertical scroll function. But it can't be turned off with a key press or key combination; rather, you must jump into the system control software to tackle this task. The keyboard touch is very comfortable, but the key travel is a little soft for our taste. Otherwise, there's not much to dislike about the nx9420's input devices. The keyboard offers a very nice feel with a noticeable switch point.

Takes numbers by storm: a separate numeric keypad

With its own separate numeric keypad and a calculator shortcut button on the top right of the keyboard deck, this notebook makes numeric data entry a snap (just as you'd expect on any good business notebook).

Sound Quality

Playback on the stereo speakersis clean and very clear, even at maximum volume levels, though the bass is a bit too light to make the nx9420 a true high fidelity device. Here again, two buttons make it possible to control sound volume independently of Windows widgets. These are placed next to a mute button that offers immediate sound cut-off.

The sound driver that appears in the Windows configuration promises 7.1 sound. But because this notebook offers no SPDIF output, this claim remains purely theoretical. Using the integrated speakers in the notebook, only two-channel sound is possible. When playing games such as Spellforce 2, users can run only Miles Fast 2D with no audio support for EAX or EAX2 available.

System Restore And Recovery

As with the Acer notebook, no restore CD or DVD comes with the nx9420. Users must build a restore disks for themselves if they're not willing to rely on the infallibility of their hard disk drive. All necessary files for recovery are available from Recovery Partition D on that drive, however.

Running a system restore from the hard disk is super easy: Click the F11 key during boot-up and the notebook boots up in a recovery program. Recovery and reinstallation takes about 30 minutes. After that you need only reboot to be back in operation. This is simple and quick.

You can only burn one set of recovery media!

It's important to keep track of any recovery CD or DVD media you produce. The terms of the Microsoft license are such that you're allowed to produce only one backup set on CD or DVD. If you lose this copy, you can't create another one!