First I must admit I know very little about laptops. The past several weeks I have been searching for one for my son, who will need it for school. A model that seems to fit his needs, and is almost in the price range, is the Acer model 5504WXMI offered for B 44,900 at Pantip, VAT included. Does anyone have any pro/con comments on this model?

With Acers, you get good specs for your money. The build quality isn't as great as Japanese brands, but if you don't need ruggedness, then it's good enough.

The 5504wmxi is based on the older Centrino Pentium M CPU. The current ones are based on the Core Duo or Core Solo. Otherwise, the rest of the specs are pretty good, with a good graphics card and DVD burner. You might want to upgrade the ram to at least 1GB (you don't need to buy the ram at the notebook shop, since they usually overcharge).

Or you could go for the Core Duo models (two CPUs). The 5562NWXMi is the equivalent of the 5504, but with a Core Duo CPU and a slot-loading DVD writer. It's 49,900, but I recommend this over the older model.

On a related note, notebooks based on AMD's dual core 64-bit mobile CPU are appearing overseas, and Acer will probably the first to market with these new CPUs (as usual). If you're interested in waiting for the latest and greatest, they should start appearing in Thailand in about a month or so.