7. Touchpad And Keyboard

In terms of positional accuracy we rate this touchpad, which may also be switched on and off, as good. The combination of its two mouse buttons and its cursor controls make it a good substitute for a conventional mouse. The height of the palm rest in front of the touchpad is slightly lower than the device itself, so it's fairly comfortable to rest your hand there.

The switch point for the keyboard keys is noticeable, and the keyboard flexes somewhat when typing quickly. The placement of the "€" (Euro currency symbol) and the "$" keys near the cursor buttons is irksome because it increases the odds of keystroke errors.

Sound Quality

The tone of the two loudspeakers is a little muffled, but clear. There is some distortion when sound levels are pushed to the max. You can control sound level independently of Windows using two buttons to the left of the keyboard. Together with two other buttons, these serve to control the audio player. Both the analog and digital (SPDIF optical) audio outputs support stereo audio drivers. While playing Spellforce 2, we were also able to select and activate sound support for EAX 2.

As with many other multimedia notebooks, the maximum sound level on the Aspire could be louder. But this would probably only exacerbate the distortion we heard at higher volume settings. At more normal volume the sound from the two built-in loudspeakers was quite acceptable. The Realtek audio mixer offers numerous audio effects along with a karaoke function.

Acer System Restore And Recovery

Acer includes no recovery CD or DVD with this notebook. Creating a recovery disk is left to the user, with the help of the unit's pre-installed eRecovery Manager software. Users can also restore the factory default system from the hard disk by pressing the "ALT+F10" key combination during boot-up. All told, a complete system recovery takes about 25 minutes to complete.

We recommend making a backup system copy on DVD in any case. It takes about forty minutes to burn such a disk from a brand-new system straight from the factory carton. But then, if a virus ever takes the notebook out of action, it can be back at work in no more than thirty minutes.