Acer Aspire 8943g

The Acer Aspire 8943g has the power and components to satisfy multimedia enthusiasts and gamers alike. From its drop-dead-gorgeous 18.4-inch 1080p screen and Blu-ray drive to its Core i7 CPU and ATI graphics chip, there’s a lot to love here. Admittedly, $1,599 is a bit of a splurge in these days of highly able under-$1,000 laptops, but when you add up what a gaming PC, a small high-def television, a compact stereo shelf system, and a Blu-ray player would cost you separately, the Aspire 8943g adds up to a pretty good deal, especially if you need most of those items.

Like all big-screen desktop-replacement portables, there’s no getting around the Aspire 8943g’s bulk. Weighing 10.1 pounds and measuring 1.7x17.3x11.6 inches (HWD), you won’t be popping this puppy open on an airplane tray table anytime soon. On the outside, the silver-and-black chassis is a bit generic, but the design improves under the lid, where an expansive, Chiclet-style silver keyboard is set off by a wide black band surrounding the glossy touch pad.

In addition to the dual-mode touch pad, Acer includes an old-school volume dial nestled on the front edge just below the keypad. It’s easy to find and spin with your thumb, and doing so pops up a circular volume indicator onscreen, so you know where in the range from 0 to 100 the volume is set.

Of course, the star of the show is that 1080p HD screen. On many portables, a 1,920x1,080 resolution makes for eye-wearying, tiny default text in Windows apps. But here, spread across more than 18 inches, that resolution delivers crisp text that’s also very readable. Also, there’s plenty of room to have two applications open in windows next to each other.

Featuring edge-to-edge glass, the bright screen is LED-backlit and has an exceedingly wide viewing angle side-to-side, making it ideal to plop on the coffee table to share a movie with one or two friends. Just be sure to have the screen open to just the right angle, or you’ll see a brightness shift that washes out the vibrant colors and blacks. Thanks to the combo Blu-ray reader/DVD burner, you can put the HD screen to use with a disc like the Blu-ray version of Live Free or Die Hard we used for testing. Action scenes (there were, let us say, a few) played flawlessly without any noticeable motion blur, and even dark scenes showed good detail in shadow areas.

This laptop's Dolby Home Theater audio system is very good for movie playback, delivering clear dialogue and plenty of volume and punch when needed from the widely spaced deck-mounted speakers. For music playback, the speakers are good enough to fill a small room with sound without clipping or distortion, and they deliver decent bass response given this is essentially a flat portable box. That said, the sound quality—most notably the clarity of the midrange and high notes—is a notch below the best we’ve heard, from machines such as the now-defunct HP HDX or the Toshiba Qosmio.  

As for other features, Acer has included a 500GB hard drive, plus an internal slot for a second drive. However, Acer doesn’t yet sell the Aspire 8943g equipped with dual drives; you’ll have to have a local PC shop or Acer reseller do the upgrade. You do get a five-format memory-card reader (but no ExpressCard slot), Bluetooth 3.0 and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi wireless connectivity, a fingerprint reader, and a 1.3-megapixel Webcam. Acer toyed with the idea of building in a TV tuner (in fact, our late preproduction unit had the connector hole for one), but ultimately decided against it, at least for now. That may be just as well, since the onboard TV tuners that we’ve seen in laptops tend to deliver a soft image not becoming of a 1080p screen. If you must, you can add an external PC TV tuner via one of the four USB ports. And overall, the port selection on the Aspire 8943g is very good, with, in addition to the four USBs, a USB/eSATA combo port, and connectors for HDMI, VGA, FireWire, and Gigabit Ethernet.

As for software, Acer includes the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium, which includes the excellent Media Center interface for music, photo, and video playback. You also get the Microsoft Works 2007 productivity suite and Acer’s own system and backup tools. Another software perk is the company’s Arcade Deluxe environment for multimedia playback. (Worth noting: Arcade Deluxe supports the playback of Blu-ray discs, which Windows Media Center can’t handle.) As with other consumer notebooks, there’s also a fair amount of trial software preloaded, although it is stuff you might actually want: Microsoft Office 2007, McAfee Security Suite, and Norton Online Backup. Acer backs the system with a one-year International Travelers warranty with 24/7 phone tech support.

The Acer Aspire 8943g is a fully loaded desktop replacement that can serve as the hub of your computing, multimedia, and gaming universes. If gaming is a priority for you, and you're looking for a versatile laptop that can bridge all three of those worlds, the bang for the buck this $1,599 big-screen beauty delivers is tough to beat.