It is a good work horse for me not too powerful and not too lame.There's nothing cutting-edge about the Acer's business-minded Extensa 4260-6194—but that's not to say there's nothing to like about it. Acer's plain-looking thin-and-light is a solid, well-built machine that fulfills its business role well, despite its obvious shortcomings. And, at $90(refurbish), it should appeal to both suits and bargain hunters alike.
Like most business laptops, the Extensa 4260 is a clunky affair. There's the odd curve here and softened edge there, but from a design perspective, it's very unimaginative, with a bland, gray color scheme. Still, despite its boxy appearance, this 5.3-pound thin-and-light isn't terribly heavy, so you can easily pack it in your briefcase when you're on the road. The screen is another pleasant surprise. Acer fitted this model with a gorgeous 14.1-inch, 1,280x800-resolution LCD. The matte display is sharp, with excellent viewing angles, so more than one person can huddle around this laptop to watch DVDs or examine spreadsheets. One caveat: The black bezel bordering the screen is too thick for our tastes.
As for controls, the Extensa 4260 features Acer's signature ergonomic keyboard. It's bouncy to type on, but quiet and responsive, as are the touch pad's buttons, which give a solid click with each press. In between the buttons, you'll also find a four-way scroll button. We found it particularly helpful when scrolling through long Web pages or documents. The touch pad itself, however, is a bit on the cramped side.
Connectivity-wise, the machine has four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire jack, a 5-in-1 media-card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, S-Video and VGA video connections, and a Type II PC Card slot. That's a decent selection for a business thin-and-light, though we would have welcomed the addition of a newer ExpressCard slot. Our system also came with front-access switches for Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g) and Bluetooth.
With its 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo T5450 processor, 1GB of RAM (expandable to 2GB) and integrated graphics, the Extensa 4260 is a bit underpowered by today's standards. Its budget leanings showed on our benchmark tests (which may explain why it runs Windows XP Professional instead of Vista). The notebook managed a score of 2,961 on Futuremark's PCMark05 productivity test—a tad lower than what we saw from the Toshiba Satellite Pro A200-EZ2204X and Fujitsu LifeBook V1010 budget business laptops we tested recently, but it's still suitable for office tasks. Multimedia performance was even less exciting: the system clocked in at a pokey 7 minutes and 6 seconds on our iTunes Encoding test, and was unable to break the 500 mark on our Cinebench 9.5 test, scoring an unimpressive 376. Clearly, this machine wasn't made for multimedia work, so power users and even casual gamers should steer clear. On our battery-drain test, the Extensa 4260 held on for 2 hours and 15 minutes, which is about average for a system of this size.
Overall, the Extensa 4260 is a "work first, play later" laptop. Its tiny price tag is matched by its average performance. Only consider this bargain-priced portable if your computing demands are modest and unlikely to grow in the near future.