Acer Aspire 5536

What's most attractive about the Aspire 5536 is its build quality and design, and one of the best things about it is that while it looks sporty, it still maintains an air of professionalism. Not only students and young professionals but even businesspersons will appreciate the overall look and feel. 

As far as features are concerned, this laptop has a good mix to meet multimedia and office-centric requirements. Be it an office suite such as Microsoft Office 2007, or watching a movie with surround sound, the 5536 won't disappoint.

Some of the features are standard and some rather rare. The standard ones include 4 USB, a VGA and an Ethernet port, a Kensington lock slot, an Ethernet jack, a multi-card reader and audio jacks. The HDMI port will allow connectivity with an HDTV and the fax modem (RJ11 jack) can be used for exchanging faxes via a standard phone line. Considering that this laptop is more inclined towards light multimedia and business or office applications, and also considering the presence of an above average hard drive capacity, there should have been an eSATA port present. Finally there's a DVD writer present too.

Built around an AMD 780 G chipset, it is powered by an AMD Athlon X2 QL-64 processor which is clocked at 2.10 GHz. There's a modest 2 GB RAM and a 320 GB hard drive. The discrete graphics is courtesy ATI Radeon HD 3200.

The overall design and build quality are excellent, although towards the bulky side. This laptop is great for professionals and for people who would usually use it on their desks. The chiclet keyboard and the touch pad, both are quite comfortable to use. The ports and connectors are well placed on each side of the unit.

Performance–wise, the 5536 is good for office use and for light to moderately demanding applications. Office and designing suites, and even imaging, editing and filters will be manageable. Heavy multimedia such as audio and video encoding or transcoding would be too much to ask from this laptop. Light entertainment will be fun. It's worth mentioning that the built-in sound is quite impressive.

At Rs. 31,927, the Acer Aspire 5536 is a good mix of features for light entertainment and office applications.

Technical Specs

• Dimensions (WxHxD): 383 x 37 x 250 mm
• Weight: 2.60 kg
• Processor: AMD Athlon X2 QL-64, 2.10 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB DDR2
• Hard disk: 320 GB
• Screen size: 15.6-inch
• Connectivity: Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi N and Bluetooth