This is not your usual laptop review that you read on all the other computer sites that review laptops all the time. This is more of a personal experience review with a laptop that I have purchased recently. I needed a lightweight laptop with excellent battery and enough power so that my work would not be slowed down while working with it. My last laptop was a 15.4″ Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista that was to heavy to be portable. It also did not have the power that I needed for a fluent workflow.
Here is what I usually need the laptop for. I need it to update my blogs, surf the web, work in Microsoft Office, view movies and to play music. The laptop should come with a good batter that would last longer than the usual 3-4 hours that most laptop manufacturers seem to favor so that it could be used on longer trips without the need of finding a power source to charge the battery on the trip. I did not need a laptop for gaming or other performance intensive tasks like video editing.
Acer Aspire 3810T 354G32N Specs
- Display: 13,3″ (1.366×768)
- CPU: INTEL Core 2 Solo SU3500 1.40GHz
- RAM: 4096MB(2x2GB)
- HDD/LW: 320GB / no optical drive
- OS: Vista Home Premium (Windows 7 Home Premium update included)
- Video: Intel GMA X4500HD (IGP) max.1792MB shared memory
- Power: 5600 mAh Li-Ion
- Lan: 10/100/1000 LAN, Wake-on-LAN-ready
- Wifi: Integrated Intel® Wireless WiFi Link 5100 (802.11a/b/g/Draft-N)
- Extras: 5-in-1 Card-Reader (MMC, SD, MS, MS Pro, xD), RJ45, Acer Crystal Eye webcam,
- Weight: 1,60 kg
- Dimensions: 322 (W) x 228 (D) x 23.4/28.9 (H) mm
- Price: 598,00 €
Design and Usability:
The design of the laptop is excellent. I do not care that much about the looks of a laptop but some users do. It looks professional and comes with several comfortable features that make working with the laptop easier. It is for example possible to disable the touch pad by pressing a button next to it. This is great if the touch pad is not needed at the time. The keyboard is not as wide as a standard desktop keyboard but it is wide enough to not cause problems while using it. Typing on it is as fast as typing on a regular keyboard. It might feel a bit unusual at first glance as the keys are large and flat offering a similar feel than many Apple and Sony Vaio notebooks.
The one thing that is missing is an external volume control. Acer provides a software that handles the volume control which is only available for Windows. Users who plan to install a different operating system should consider this. I have installed Windows 7 on it and had to download the software from the Acer website to be able to control the volume with their program (it is possible to change the volume in Windows as well but the software offers hotkey support for that).
My Experience:
We all know that hardware specs are not everything and that they can differ widely from what users experience while working with the hardware device. The Acer Aspire 3810T promised a lot, especially in battery running time. I’m currently sitting outside typing this review into the laptop. The battery meter is showing 51% remaining batter power which is good for another 5 hours and 40 minutes of working with the laptop. These values can only be achieved by configuring power settings properly. A full screen brightness and performance reduces the time quite a bit. There are however no performance reductions or to dark screens in this setting. It is absolutely possible to achieve a running time on battery of 10 hours and more. It still depends on the tasks that are done while running on battery but it definitely is valid for most every day uses.
There was no problem writing a blog post on the Internet and listening to music or watching a movie. I have not tested game performance other than a few flash games on the Internet. It turned out that these flash games played fine. Problems appeared however when playing a movie and high end flash game simultaneously. This reduced the frame rate of the flash game significantly.
The laptop should be fast enough to play older games that support an onboard video card . Newer games on the other hand will most likely not run at all on the Acer laptop. But that’s something that the laptop has not been designed for anyway.
Verdict:
The Acer Aspire 3810T Timeline laptop is an excellent piece of hardware for users who want to be mobile. Its weight and battery make it a perfect companion for business users and everyone else who needs to travel or work with a computer in different locations. The Acer Aspire 3910T costs roughly two times as much as a netbook. It offers a better performance, bigger screen and keyboard that most netbooks do not come with.
I have not had the time but I plan to install Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 on the laptop to see how it performs then. If anyone is interested in other applications let me know in the comments.
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