Acer eMachines eMD620-5777 $430 bargain laptop

Acer has brought back its eMachines notebook line-up when it announced the launch of a 14.1-inch widescreen notebook, the eMachines eMD620-5777, on Thursday.The eMachines eMD620-5777 will be sold at Best Buy beginning November 1 for a netbook-level price of $429.99. For someone who wants to step up from a netbook's small display to a 14.1-inch widescreen, the new (rebadged?) eMachines laptop might be the way to go.

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But here are two things to give you pause: 1 gigabyte of RAM, and Vista Basic. Couple that with the integrated ATI Radeon X1200, which will share said memory, slowing it down further, and you have a recipe for what could be a seriously slow machine. There's no mention of Windows XP in the press release; you might be able to downgrade it to the older operating system, but I'm not sure.

The eMD620-5777 is powered by a an AMD Athlon 2650e, which is actually a new, power-efficient processor, and will bump up battery life a bit. A DVD+/- drive is included, together with a pair of USB ports and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi.

The new notebook sports a 1.6GHz AMD Athlon CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard-drive for a price usually associated with much smaller netbooks. Other features of the notebook include a full-size keyboard, integrated b/g Wi-Fi module, a DVD-R/RW drive and an ATI Radeon X1200 graphics chipset that can pull up to nearly 2GB of system memory for its own ends.