Name: Acer Ferrari: The $2,000 Windows XP Laptop from 2005
Uploaded: 2020-03-06T23:02:33.000Z
Duration: 12 min 26 s
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Adverbs of manner

And hold your horses folks, cuz I’ve finally fulfilled a boyhood fantasy: owning a Ferrari.

Er well, a Ferrari laptop but whatever, close enough I guess.

This is the Ferrari 4005 WLMi from Acer, which sold for about $2,000 US dollars

And yes, this is an official Ferrari licensed product, emblazoned with the same iconic prancing

horse badge as all their vehicles since 1947.

As well as the equally iconic Rosso Corsa red paint used by Ferrari and other Italian

Though not as much of said red as other Acer offerings.

Like the Acer Ferrari 3000, which was a horse of a different color indeed, going all-in

with the high-gloss Ferrari red paint scheme.

By comparison, the 4000 series is more restrained aesthetically, opting instead for red highlights

and a lid topped with real carbon fiber for an extra dash of motor racing flair.

Which, let’s be honest, while it was claimed the carbon fiber helped eliminate lid flex

and reduce weight, the main reason it’s here is because they thought it looked cool.

The whole lid is coated in a glossy plastic resin too so it still feels like plastic regardless.

And any weight-saving attributes are overshadowed by the sheer girth of the rest of the machine,

weighing in at around six and a half pounds or 2.9 kilograms,

and that’s without the battery installed.

So yeah, the Acer Ferrari is fully decked out with mid-2000s portable computing power,

as you’d expect for a machine that cost twice as much as the average laptop at the time.

But beyond its exotic branding and flashy shell,

what’d you actually get for your $2,000 back then?

Well, Windows XP for one thing, which was still the latest Microsoft OS since Vista

wouldn’t hit store shelves for another year.

You also got an AMD Turion 64 ML-37 CPU running at two gigahertz, allowing for an upgrade

path to 64-bit versions of Windows if you desired.

Though you only got one gigabyte of DDR-333 RAM by default, so upgrading to its maximum

And the laptop screen itself was quite respectable for the time, with a matte finish 15.4”

TFT LCD displaying 16:10 aspect ratio resolutions up to 1680x1050.

Driving this is an ATi Mobility Radeon X700 graphics chipset with 128 megabytes of video

memory, something we’ll definitely be trying out with some Windows XP gaming classics.

For storage there’s an admirable 100 gigabyte 2.5" 5400 RPM hard drive inside, around twice

the capacity found on most other laptops of its day.

Also nice is the 8x DVD-RW combo drive, capable of burning both DVD and CD rewritable discs.

Though originally it had a bright red slot-loading drive, so I assume it died or something cuz

it only had this tray-loader when I bought this secondhand.

And in terms of ports, well, check this out.

On the left-hand side you’ve got 15-pin VGA output, gigabit ethernet and 56k modem

jacks, a USB 2.0 port, a micro Firewire connection, and a PCMCIA card expansion slot.

Around back there’s a proprietary PCI Express connector for an optional docking station,

and both DVI-D and S-video output ports on the opposite corner.

And on the right-hand side there’s a Kensington lock, 19-volt power connection, the aforementioned

DVD burner, and three more USB 2.0 ports making a total of four.

It keeps going along front as well, with a 5-in-1 memory card reader that handles SD,

MMC, and XD cards, as well as Sony Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro.

To the right is a built-in mic, an infrared port, LED status indicators, ports for both

headphone out and microphone in, and light-up buttons for toggling Bluetooth and 802.11G WiFi.

The front here is also where you find the laptop’s speakers,

these two little things off to each side.

They sound okay, but they’re still one of the weaker aspects of the system, you’d

think they could’ve found room for larger ones above the keyboard.

Because I mean, look at all that unused space!

Acer could’ve had even more room too if they didn’t add those extraneous quick launch

buttons up top, or used this unusual smiley face-looking key arrangement.

As for the keyboard itself, eh, it’s fine.

It’s no ThinkPad keyboard, that’s for sure, but it gets the job done with halfway

decent plastic caps and key travel of around two millimeters.

The smiley face arch layout takes a minute to get used to, but it’s spread out enough

What bothered me more were these dedicated Euro and Dollar Sign keys down here, exactly

the same size as the arrow keys and positioned right up against them, making the arrows feel

And the soft rubbery material surrounding everything?

While I’m sure it was comfortable back in 2005, it’s starting to deteriorate and get

sticky, an unfortunately common problem with devices using this stuff.

Speaking of aging disgracefully, this trackpad definitely shows its age.

The touch surface is comically small compared to the rest of the machine, the buttons’

silver finish wears down easily, and it has one of those 4-way scrolling switches in the

Fortunately, they’ve included a Bluetooth mouse as well, with matching Ferrari emblem

Again, the rubbery bits are slowly melting a decade and a half later, but otherwise it’s

it’s time to crank the Acer Ferrari to life and take it for a test drive!

Yes, that was a picture of Michael Schumacher’s Formula One Ferrari

instead of the typical Acer POST screen, a nice touch indeed.

And I hope you’re not opposed to constant fan noise, because the exhaust fan is always

audibly spinning at this speed, or higher.

Unlike an actual Ferrari though, the exhaust note leaves something to be desired.

Now originally, these Acer Ferraris came with a Ferrari F1 Windows theme,

complete with screaming V10 noises on startup.

Unfortunately, when I got mine the drive had been completely wiped,

And while it did come with the restore CDs holding all the drivers, unless you have that

hard drive partition intact you can’t restore the entire thing as it was from the factory.

So I chose to manually recreate my own Ferrari theme on a fresh XP installation.

I was able to get some of the original stuff off those recovery discs though, like the

Ferrari World screensaver: a simple, and quite frankly boring, slideshow that flips through

There’s also a set of wallpapers acting as a Ferrari-themed calendar, with 24 backgrounds