The Acer TravelMate 6465WLMi is quite a large notebook which boasts a 15.4" 1680x1050 resolution screen capable of reproducing 16 million colours and is backed by an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 graphics card with 128MB RAM; shared system memory can bloat this out to 512MB. The CPU is a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The machine was supplied with 1GB of RAM expandable to 4GB.

The outer screen casing and touchpad surround are silver, with charcoal grey being the dominant shade elsewhere. The touch pad panel also features a fingerprint reader and a second set of buttons to operate with the pointing stick. Overall, the 6465WLMi is a classy looking machine.

The 6465WLMi is supplied with a 120GB SATA hard-drive and DVD burner. The Gigabit Ethernet support is supplemented with inbuilt Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi and Firewire connectivity. Audio ports and speakers are conveniently placed at the front of the machine along with the switches for Bluetooth and wireless LAN. A small internal microphone is clearly marked with an icon to the lower left of the keyboard. Ports include USB 2.0 and three types of video input (D-sub VGA, DVI and S-Video with dual screen support) as well as SD/xD/Memory Stick, PCMCIA, smartcard and ExpressCard slots.

Acer boasts that almost all management functions are no more than three mouse-clicks away. This is easy to believe given the number of buttons and icons littering the desktop prior to the installation of the user's own software. A dozen icons appear in the system tray plus there is a special Acer eManagement toolbar to handle access to such areas as network, security and screen management.

The 6465WLMi also features active HDD protection features such as shock protection and "Gravisense" which detects movement of the machine and retracts the disk head to prevent scratching