Acer ships new 17-inch Aspire desktop replacement

Acer took advantage of the immediate wake of CES' opening to revamp one of its larger Aspire notebooks. At 17 inches, the 7720 is intended as a full substitute for a desktop but tries to balance between this and cost: the system uses a new budget Core 2 Duo clocked at 1.66GHz but balances this with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB GeForce 8400M GS that offloads much of the graphics work for games, HD video, and Vista itself from the CPU. It also carries a relatively large 250GB hard drive.

The system is based on Acer's Gemstone design and adds Dolby Home Theater for improved sound out of the box as well as a lid-mounted webcam. The design is intended for retail and should be enroute to stores today for about $1,049.