Though the case is an attractive cobalt blue, the unit screams "average" when you factor in its 1.5-inch thickness and 6.2-pound weight. It's a tight fit in my LowePro FastPack 250 backpack--the power brick needed to go into a separate compartment.

The system's performance is pretty standard for a laptop in this class, as this portable earned WorldBench 6 scores that were slightly better than average. The gaming results, however, seemed quite good for a $750 notebook, even in modern games: It achieved frame rates over 30 frames per second in Far Cry 2 with optimal settings in DirectX 10 mode, while the more-demanding STALKER: Call of Pripyat needed to be set at moderate settings to hit over 30 fps (but that included enabling DX11 tessellation).

The display resolution is a middling 1366 by 768 pixels. While it is bright and saturated, the 60 percent color gamut means that you wouldn't want to do a lot of heavy video or photo editing. DVD upscaling looked good, especially after we enabled the additional 'Theater' preset in the . The 1080p files we viewed in Windows Media Player also looked good, even though the resolution was scaled down. The real drawback of the LCD screen, however, was the vertical viewing angle; even a slight vertical tilt resulted in a muddy, posterized mess of an image.

While the display mostly impressed us (within its limits), audio playback was awful. The soundstage was muddy, with the stereo image vague at best. The overall tonal quality was too bright, midrange was lost in the mix, and bass was utterly lacking. My advice: Use good in-ear or full-size headphones for listening to music.

The Aspire 5740G-6979 is a mixed bag when it comes to input/output ports, too. It delivers four USB 2.0 ports, but none are of the combo USB/eSATA variety. The system offers no support either. The laptop does conveniently place two USB ports on either side, though. The five-in-one flash card reader is mounted in the front of the chassis. Two display outputs (HDMI and VGA), plus analog audio ports and a gigabit ethernet jack, reside on the left side.