Acer Aspire Timeline X 5830T 15.6 inch Notebook (Intel Core i7-2620M Processor, 6GB RAM, 500GB HDD, nVIDIA GeForce GT 540M, Windows 7 Home Premium) - Aluminium is very smart, tidy, very functional and very very fast.

Within minutes of switch on, after all the registration rigmarole that you have to go through these days, I burned some recovery DVD's. This will take up 4 disks for the system, apps, bloatware etc. and 1 more for the drivers and bits and bobs, so have 5 blank DVD's ready, and a spare hour or so.

Everything works as it should BUT, my bluetooth mouse is ignored on bootup as bluetooth is disabled at boot time, I guess for security reasons. <Fn><F3> and a click on the touchpad fixes that.

This laptop is a delight to use with its 6GB RAM and i7 processor, it loads a spreadsheet almost before you can take your finger off the mouse button. Just to speed the bootload cycle I swapped the 500G HDD for a Momentus Hybrid 500GB drive and reinstalled the system using the four system recovery DVD's. (to get at the HDD, there is just one screw in the base to reveal the drive and two screws holding the drive in place, making the exchange childs play. The memory cards are also there under the panel)

I've been really mean to award only four stars for this product but I would have liked Acer to give the option to boot with bluetooth enabled.

For the price this is an amazing laptop and I am very impressed with the specification and the build quality. As usual, the battery lifetime between charges is quite optimistic, but within a few full charge cycles you should get a full days work in without having to find a mains socket.

P.S. The batteries are quite thirsty on recharge so my 12v car charger 60W device can't quite cope if I carry on working while charging. If you want a 12v car charger for this laptop, get one with a lot more than 60W capability.