Acer in Spades

The rest of the world has been gobbling up great bunches of Acer computers for years now, while Dell and HP and other Americanos battled for market share here in the U.S. and A. This past year, Acer bought Gateway with some $700 million in loose change it had lying about and will concentrate on increasing the former company's local footprint.

Snazzy laptops like the Aspire 8920 shown to our left should attract finicky consumers who think computers should look as good as they perform. The 8920 is part of Acer's Gemstone Blue series, with a lustrous blue-black lid and a sleek black and silver interior. But it's what pops off the 18.4-inch screen that will really widen your pupils. The 8920 will play Blu-ray disks in 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning you're getting the full dimension, clarity and vivid color you'd expect from a big HD teevee.

Some of the glory should go to Nvidia for its GeForce 9650m graphics processor, which kicks out the 1920 X 1080 resolution vidgeeks long for. Add Intel's top-o-the line Core 2 Duo processor (2.6 GHz) and 4 GB's of SDRAM and you've got warp-speed performance to go with the razor-sharp images. The capacious chassis has room for a full keyboard as well as a touch-sensitive media control area on the left flank, shaped intuitively like a remote control. Nice touch, that. And the sound is amazing for a laptop! A 5.1 speaker system with a subwoofer tries to simulate the surround experience, and acquits itself admirably.

All in all, this nine-pound bundle of bit-crushing joy is as good as it gets at the multimedia laptop high end. And if you've already made the move to Blu-ray for the home, this is the only way to go to squeeze every bit of a/v love out of those pricey disks. Acer rules.