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The Travelmate 6292, abbreviated TM6292, is Acer's first business notebook to pack Intel's new Santa Rosa technology.
Its most obvious competitor is the Lenovo Thinkpad X60; a notebook with terrific battery life and compact dimensions.
This Acer model is more stylish than any Thinkpad we've ever used, but it also matches the excellent build quality Thinkpads are famous for.
The chassis is a combination of strong but light, speckled carbon fibre and plastic. It's a little chunky, but this can be forgiven since it squeezes in a DVD writer.
Running the show is a new T7300 Core 2 Duo processor with a fast 800MHz front side bus (FSB). The motherboard is based on Intel's new Santa Rosa 965 chipset and is filled with 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory across two slots. It would have been preferable to see 800MHz Ram, since the memory would be synchronised with the FSB for better performance, but this is in short supply at present.
Using the synthetic benchmark PCmark05 we witnessed very good performance for such a small notebook, with an overall score of 4,037. This includes a whopping 5,108 in the CPU section and 4,238 in the memory section of the benchmark - that's 13 and 12 per cent faster than the Zepto Znote we recently reviewed.
This new T7300 2GHz chip beats the two closest 667MHz FSB models (the 2GHz T7200 and the 2.13GHz T7400) by 5-7 per cent in terms of memory performance. Rather unsurprisingly, the T7200 achieved exactly the same CPU score, while the T7400 has a six per cent lead over the T7300 in this section.
Acer has also included is Intel's new integrated graphics chip, the X3100. It scored 883 in 3Dmark05 and 602 in 3Dmark06, which is roughly 50 per cent faster than the GMA 950 graphics it replaces.
However, it's still no good for gamers and sits between Nvidia's Geforce 6150 and the ATI Radeon X1250 graphics. Fear ran at 19 frames per second (fps), which is double what the GMA 950 achieved in our labs, but still short of minimum 30fps mark needed for smooth gaming.
Of course, this is a workhorse notebook and not a gaming machine, so poor graphics performance is expected. However, we did notice that, when under strain, the notebook blew out remarkably hot air, although the system never got too hot to touch throughout.
A 12.1in widescreen display with a 1,280x800 pixel resolution shows an evenly and reasonably bright picture. The bezel is rather thick, more than twice as wide as the X60's, but it does incorporate a 1.3-megapixel webcam.
Thanks to a six-cell battery, the notebook lasted just a minute under two hours in our DVD run down test; good, but not breathtaking. Under light office-based working we squeezed two hours 56 minutes out of it. An extended, nine-cell battery that should last 50 per cent longer costs £99.
In the corporate market a level of stability is required by IT departments so older software and peripherals continue to work. Because of this, current shipments of the Travelmate 6292 will come with XP Professional; Acer says that Vista Business may be an option in the future. A PC Card slot is included, instead of the new and faster Express Card slot.
One design flaw is that Acer has put the two of the three USB2 ports on top of each other, which means one might not be usable when a thick USB peripheral is plugged in.
Other features include a fingerprint scanner sandwiched between the mouse buttons, Draft-N wireless and a 160GB hard disk, which is large by notebook standards. A fairly basic software bundle comprises Cyerblink PowerDVD 7 and the authoring software NTI CD Maker.
The X60 has been upgraded since we last reviewed it, but with every component of a higher specification the Acer Travelmate 6292 is better value for money.
If you plan any kind of multimedia playback (DVD or otherwise) or you might play the occasional, low-quality game, we'd still recommend this Acer. But if mobility is key, then the X60 remains king of the hill. The Travelmate 6292 weighs 2.45kg (2.05kg without the PSU), which is considerably more than the X60's 1.8kg. What's more, although the Acer's keyboard is good, it's not as firm as the Lenovo's alternative.
With the Travelmate 6292 Acer has really pushed the boat out in terms of packing decent components into such a small package.
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