So, having cleaned the skeletons from the cupboard, lets move onto the more positive elements because there are quite a few, and the big news is that £586 buys you a lot of laptop. At the heart of the 1355XC is an AMD Athlon XP-M 2600+ which is supported by 256MB of 333MHz DDR SDRAM. You also get a 30GB ATA100 hard disk and a 14.1in screen. Yes, there could perhaps be a little more RAM, but extra modules are fairly cheap these days if you wish to upgrade. A further bonus is the inclusion of a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive that reads DVDs at 8x speed, reads CDs at 24x speed, writes CD-Rs at 16x speed and rewrites CD-RW discs at 12x speed. A two-speed DVD writer is available at extra cost, but for the money the supplied drive is excellent value and because of the size of the 1355XC's chassis, you also get a built-in floppy drive.

In fact, the size of the machine in general actually proves to be a big plus because, as I explained earlier, the Aspire 1355XC uses the same chassis as more expensive models and consequently you reap the benefits of a well designed and well equipped layout. For instance, you get four USB 2.0 ports instead of the two that are normally allocated on budget machines. You get the usual modem, headphone socket, microphone socket, infrared port, serial and parallel ports but you also get 10/100Mbps Ethernet, FireWire, S-Video out and one Type III/two Type II PC Card slot.

But the most impressive feature is the keyboard. Laptops in general can suffer from poor keyboards, that's no secret. So to get a tactile, responsive keyboard on such an inexpensive system is a major bonus. In fact, I have experienced far worse keyboards on laptops costing over twice this much. I simply enjoyed typing on it. Supporting this is a touchpad which seems little different from any of Acer's more expensive laptops. Below the touchpad you'll find the familiar four-way rocker button, while the left and right selector buttons have a solid feel.

The 14.1in screen is more standard, supporting a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768, but it's bright and clear and not something I would feel justified in complaining about. The display isn't hard on the eyes even after longer periods. A more pleasant surprise was the speakers. A few months back, I tested the enormous Acer Aspire 1705SCi and found it a disappointment overall, but its speakers were excellent. Acer seems to have implanted the same speakers here, so even though the sound is still in mono, the volume is satisfyingly loud and the quality crisp. Given that most laptops still don't sound much better than a digital watch, admitting that I could happily listen to music on this notebook seems like an achievement in itself.

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