Digital Home Thoughts: PC World: "Acer Offers Budget Mobile Workstation"

"Acer America came out with a new notebook Wednesday that offers the performance of a workstation at a price that helps make up for the system's significant weight, the company said in a release. Heavy desktop replacement notebooks are nothing new to the PC market, having driven much of the consumer demand for PCs over the past year.

True mobile workstations for traveling business customers, however, are generally more expensive than the $1499 Acer Aspire 1710 introduced Wednesday. At that price, the Acer notebook includes a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor from Intel, a 17-inch wide-screen display, 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, a GeForce FX Go5700 graphics card from NVidia with 64MB of video memory, and built-in 802.11g wireless LAN technology."

Acer's new budget notebook weighs, are you ready for this, 15.7 POUNDS! 8O That's insane! But I suppose if you want desktop power for media editing in a "mobile" package, this is the way to go. I've more or less got my heart set on an HP zd7000 monster of a notebook, but it's a svelte 9 pounds. I priced out a zd7000 to match the specs on the Acer, and it comes in at $1722 - only $200 or so more than the Acer. Would you pay $200 more for a notebook that's half the weight? I would. ;-)