Not even a month ago, we reported laptops equipped with an HD-DVD drive would hit $1,000 or under and it’s happened but to the chagrin of other companies, the laptop is offered by Acer.

The Acer Aspire AS5720-6113 (available at Newegg.com) features an 1.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5250 processor, 1GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, a Geforce 8400M GS mobile graphics card with 128MB of dedicated memory and, of course, the HD-DVD/DVDRW optical drive.  The other typical laptop amenities are there, including WiFi, 15.4″ display, the usual inputs plus some extras and a battery that lasts just over two hours.

Now, there are some trade offs here, there are better laptops you can get for $1,000, you might even get one with 2GB of memory, a faster processor and an 8600M graphics card but the hard drive will be smaller and I guarantee it would not have the HD-DVD drive or be available in any retail store (online, maybe).

The display is the typical 1280 x 800 resolution but laptops from Dell and other companies offer up to 1680 x 1050 on 15.4″ and 17″ displays and I say, the higher resolution, the better but you will pay it.

This is a fairly average laptop and its only advantage is the HD-DVD drive, if that’s what you’re after then go for it but to get the most out of it you will need to jack the laptop in to your HDTV and surround sound system as 1280 x 800 is just not enough resolution to offer the full HD-DVD experience.

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Entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 3:14 pm under Notebook.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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