PHOTOS: Acer announces 7540 and 5542 multimedia notebooks

AMD Vision chips, LED displays and plenty to play with

25 September 2009 2:25 GMT / By Dan Sung

At the same time as the Ferrari One, Acer announced the slightly less glitzy but certainly more powerful Aspire 7540 and 5542 multimedia laptops.

The main difference between the two is that the 7540, as pictured, has a 17.3-inch LED backlit display, whereas the 5542 is a slightly less leg-cracking 15.6-inch machine.

Both run on dual core AMD Vision processors - of either the top end Ultimate type or the mid-range Premium - and feature, Dolby Home Theatre for 5.1 surround output, gesture control trackpads and all the connectivity both wired and wireless that one would need and expect.

There's the option of going up to a Blu-ray drive, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 500GB of storage and whether or not you want to stump up the extra £50 for an ATI 4570 GPU with 512MB of dedicated memory.

Neither machine is exactly designed for use on the move at 3.26kg and 2.8kg, and with battery lives of just 2.5 hours. On the plus side, you are getting either a 1366x768 or a 1600x900 display.

They're both out with the launch of Windows 7 Premium and start at £499.99 with dedicated GPU and £449.99 without.