ACi Acclaim

A good balance of features and build quality against portability and cost.

Price: £1761

Manufacturer: ACi

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Verdict

Plenty of features for the price, plus relatively good performance for a small portable, make the Acclaim well worth a second look if you're after a notebook light enough to travel with.

Dominic Bucknall, What PC? 21 Mar 2002

The classic sub-A4 notebook tends to exhibit three identifying characteristics: it's light, short on features and processing power, and heavy on your wallet.

This is, of course, an opportunity for good design to succeed, and nicely ushers in the star of this review, namely the ACi Acclaim. The Acclaim is a proper sub-notebook, in that it is significantly smaller and lighter than a typical portable, with a 269x242mm (WxH) footprint and a modest weight of 1.9kg.

ACi has solved the first problem that usually crops up with very small notebooks by making most of the case and lid out of magnesium alloy. This doesn't add too much to the weight, but it makes the machine much stronger and more resilient than a plastic machine.

Slimmed-down notebooks often shed all drives bar the hard disk, but the Acclaim manages to squeeze in an internal 24-speed CD-ROM drive despite only measuring 25mm thick when closed. The drive is fixed rather than modular, but you can specify alternatives like DVD or CD-RW if you want something more than just plain CD-ROM on the optical side.

The floppy drive is contained in a small external module weighing about 250g that plugs into one of the system's three USB ports. We were pleased to see the USBs, but we also noticed the parallel and serial ports have been omitted, which could cause problems for users with non-USB peripherals.

ACi does sell a port replicator if you need one.

The Acclaim has a VGA connector for running an external monitor, but there's no PS/2 port - desktop mice and keyboards will need to be USB, like everything else, unless you opt for the aforementioned port replicator.

The machine is also kitted out with a FireWire port for a fast connection to digital cameras or camcorders.

There's a Type II PC Card slot, for something like a GSM adaptor if you are serious about communications on the move. The Acclaim is already well equipped in this area, with a standard V.90 modem, a networking adaptor, and an internal wireless network adaptor that delivers a slow but functional 11Kbit/s radio frequency connection.

Subnote keyboards can be too cramped for comfort and while the Acclaim doesn't have one of the best we've seen, it remains usable. Some keys like Backspace are too small for our liking, and PgUp and PgDn are mapped on top of the arrow keys, but with a bit of practice most people should get by.

The screen isn't large either, but its 12.1in diagonal is just about enough to carry the 1024x768 default resolution, although text is fairly small. The screen isn't quite as bright as some and doesn't have a very wide viewing angle, but it's good enough to pass muster.

Of the 192Mb system memory, the SiS 630 graphics chip borrows 8Mb but this doesn't cause too many problems. The SiS isn't a very fast chipset, but is fine for typical 2D business applications.

Overall, the Acclaim was a moderate performer by the standards of 1GHz portables, though helped by having plenty of memory. Subnotes tend to be on the slow side, and by comparison with other small portables the Acclaim held up rather well.

It also managed a reasonably sustained run on battery power, which can be another weak spot on such small machines. What you get will vary depending on what you are doing, but for normal, light use you should keep going for a good 2.5 hours and possibly longer, so you will actually get some work done before the dreaded low battery beeps start up.

While it isn't perfect, the Acclaim does a good job of balancing features, performance and build quality against portability and cost. With a year's collect and return warranty plus lifetime labour and technical support, in the final analysis this notebook is good value.

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