I happened to lay my hands recently, on what I consider to one of the best budget laptop / notebook, available right now in the market : The Acer 4710z.

Specifications:
Intel Dual Core T2080 @ 1.73 GHz (1 MB L2 533 FSB)
1 GB DDR-II 667 MHz
160 GB SATA
Intel GMA 950 (Mobile 943 Chipset)
14.1? Wide Screen 1280×800
DVD RW
1.3 MP Web Cam
Inbuilt Mic and 2 stereo Speakers
Wireless LAN / 5 in 1 Card Reader / LAN / Bluetooth / IEEE 1934 / USB 2.0 / Supporting EXT speakers / 56.6k Modem

Smart looks, a good and a compact design is what stands out! The white keyboards look cool too, but expect them to get dirty, after daily use. Port management is good & the 4 USB ports are distributed at both sides. The headphone slot is situated in the front, which was nice to see, as it makes the headphones easy to plug in on one hand ... but on the other hand, creates a small difficulty while plugging in the bigger external speakers. The Processor used is T2080 Dual Core non 64bit one and for this segment it is more than enough.

I found its Screen to be good and bright enough. Though, it does have an issue if you directly get the sun in front of the screen. The Wide Screen Display gave me a good performance while running 720 p HD movies. But running 1080p movies was not up to mark. This lappy is thus not meant to play such high HD content.

GMA 950 is Vista Ready (not DirectX 10 for GMA 950); runs at Direct X 9.0L (DX 9.0C is for Windows XP and 9.0l is for Vista under non DX10 hardware) Mode.

I also ran some tests on it, to see the temperature limits. As you can see, under the load of Pi Test, Temperatures shot up to nearly 58 C. I ran the test for a long time! The system ran under 60 C, at all times and was stable too!

I also tested the Battery by playing a 720p HD Video from a DVD. Now with Vista, with the Screen brightness set at 40%, the lappy gave the Critical Battery warning exactly on passage of 1 hr & 51 min's.

The lappy does not come with any pre-installed OS. So at first I tried to install Fedora and Ubuntu. Both run fine, apart from WLAN and the Bluetooth. There were no Drivers available at the Acer Website. Now this was a real let down. Music players like WinAMP and VLC also worked just fine and there were no issue with the VGA or the sound.

Then I went on to install Windows XP. I faced immediate hiccups! The SATA/RAID driver cant be found under Default Windows XP SP2 installation source! As a result, HDD not was not detected by the installation media! It may not be a problem for a Pro user. I had to go to the Acer Support Site to Download the ACHI (SATA/RAID) drivers for the Model 4710z; then I had to use N-Lite, to integrate them with Windows XP; And finally, I had to burn a Bootable CD to install Windows XP. But for an average home / office users this would not be something he would want to do. After installation, the only point to note, was that, the Bluetooth did not work with XP; even after I tried to install driver from Acer Support site for Windows XP version of Bluetooth driver, it still said, “installation cant progress because only Vista is supported” !

But as I said, this Lappy is Windows Vista Ready! So I now decided to test for Vista installation. No issue at all! All went on smoothly, with Vista’s Default un-touched installation. With a 1 GB RAM, Vista ran quite smoothly. All Office applications under Vista, performed smoothly too.

And MutiTasking? Pro Apps, Little Image editing, PhotoShop, Single click DVD making for a miniDV, Ulead Video Studio 10 plugged with my Handycam, with its IEEE 1394a ... all ran quite smoothly! Running Pinnacle Studio was a little sluggish and the encoding time taken, was more than a Desktop C2D or Dell 1420 / 1520. But it did the job.

While editing video's, I surfed the Net, used Office applications, chatted in WLM too. I had no issues. The application runs fine in the background, while I run my tasks in the foreground.

Pros.

-The Config is Good (Dual Core / 1 GB / 160 GB / Vista Ready / WLAN / Modem / Bluetooth / DVD RW)
-14.1? I would say makes it light and gives better battery life too
-Nicely priced; even compared to Dell 6400.
-Fully Vista Ready.
-Can run 24×7 for those Torrent hungry people !!!

Cons.

-The Battery life isn’t that great.
-No Native support for Windows XP. XP is not natively supported because of the ChipSet 943M, but you can always make it work without any issue and just integrate the Drivers to the Windows XP installation source for SATA / RAID.
-No bundled OS, so you have to get and install your own one.
-No support for Linux at Acer Support Web Site.