I've always enjoyed using, upgrading and refurbishing old laptops and pc's, so when i grabbed this out of the loft (still in the original box and packaging) i was very pleased.

The Acer Travelmate 351TEV when first opening the box is a well packaged notebook and comes with an instruction manual, battery and charger cable. The laptop and accessories, come packed in plastic bags and securely held with a white foam mould. Keeping the laptop secure in the box to stop damage occurring.

At first un-boxing you notice the size of the device. Measuring at 29.2cm x 23.4cm x 2.1cm so its size is very small perfect for home and small business use, and weighing in at 1.9kg its handy to carry around.

Upon opening the notebook, you notice the 13.3" TFT 1024 x 768 XGA - 24bit (16.7million Colours) display. The display is controlled by the Trident Cyberblade i1-8mb Graphics controller. The notebook also has a built in speakers however not very powerful so external speakers are recommended. These are powered by a built in sound card.

This notebook comes with a Intel Pentium III 700 MHz processer and 128mb RAM, but can have up to 512mb RAM installed as an upgrade. For its day, this notebooks speed would have been very good running on a once top of the range processer and would easily start windows with minimal waiting time. However as a few pieces of software is installed, the start up time will increase.

This laptop has a 10GB Hard drive, with a Floppy drive/DVD-ROM external slot, on the laptop for external storage. Despite the small hard drive space, this laptop would have been used for word processing and spreadsheet making, so the 10gb space would have been a sufficient amount for its job.

The operating system factory installed on this notebook is Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, which starts up with minimal fuss and from new starts up fast with a low waiting time, which however is increased as the HDD is filled up more.

This notebook has network functionality, using a network adaptor -mini PCI - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet port to allow for network and internet access.

The notebook is powered by a Lithium Ion battery, which is powered by an AC 110/220 V adaptor (50/60 Hz). This gives the user a run time up to 2.5 hours.

In my opinion this notebook is a classic, and shows a good piece of history from Acers collection. At its time, this was a top of the range notebook for word processing and various spreadsheets designing and creating. By using an external Floppy drive or CD-ROM drive you can further increase this notebooks limited but powerful functionality.