Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Acer Timeline -- Just the right size and performance for a casual user, July 3, 2009
I have been using the Acer Timeline (14 inch, Aspire 4810TZ-4011) since yesterday evening and so far so good. Here are my first impressions:
1. The delivery was quick and packaging was good.
2. The looks of the laptop are fantastic. Love the isolation-type keyboard. The screen hinges could have been more solid but for a lightweight machine appear ok.
3. The eject button for the CD, various ports, the card reader, are all very suitably positioned.
4. The colours of the screen are beautiful. There are setup options to adjust those to taste, but I did not need to use them.
5. The laptop was easy to set up. I loaded the battery for about an hour before starting, perhaps an overkill, and was rewarded with a blue light coming from beneath the touchpad.
6. Setting up Vista for the first time was much quicker than my last XP setup on a netbook. Feels natural so far.
7. Soon after startup I was prompted to create recovery disks, and made two DVDs with the system and one with software.
8. There is (was) a lot of preloaded software. I spent a good deal of time finding out what it does (on Google) and cleaning most of it up.
9. People who have complained from performance issues maybe should take care to remove the redundant backup software (two or three of those pre-installed?!), the trial antivirus and other FUD nonsense.
10. I registerted for a FREE copy of Windows 7 for Timeline owners, to be shipped in October (woot!).
11. Set up Skype (after combating for a while with the firewall settings of Vista), and made a call -- the sound is good, the mic is well positioned, the camera works fine, even better after peeling off the protective plastic sheet :)
12. Tested a youtube video in HD and it did not play smooth, which was a disappointment.
Comparing this to my 4y old FS, the Acer Timeline feels about as solid, a lot more silent, cooler, lighter by more than 2 pounds, with 6 times the RAM, 4 times the battery time, and a newer processor -- clearly an upgrade in every aspect.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great laptop for linux, awesome battery life, July 10, 2009
I have had my Acer Aspire 4810TZ for all of three days now, and am quite happy with it. Some observations:
The keys are spaced very well for me ... the keyboard has an excellent feel. The glossy black finish is a bit unfortunate, as they instantly show smudging. The trackpad mouse button does indeed require Thumb of Steel, but nicely accomodates left- and right-clicking without being separated into two buttons.
I'm amazed at how happy I am with the screen. I don't like the glassy displays, but as long as the backlighting is intense, it can be used in fairly bright light. That's the case with this screen. The resolution is very crisp. I have not had any need or desire to adjust the color settings.
Speakers are not great in terms of volume, but I just can't imagine docking a review for that quibble. The laptop is thin and light - get some headphones!
The battery life is phenomenal, as advertised; the first time I've ever had a laptop that performed within 50% of the advertised battery life.
The CPU is probably a little underpowered for Vista, but not terribly so. I'm sure that I will be happier with Windows 7 when it comes out.
Now for Linux. I shrunk the Vista partition down drastically using GParted from an Ubuntu 9.04 live CD. After that was done and I rebooted, Vista determined that something was wrong and launched a repair process that took a very long time to complete (2 hours+). It then came up into Vista and I have had no problems with it.
I formatted most of the freed space to give over to Ubuntu. I was completely floored by how much worked immediately: sound, wireless, keyboard control of volume, webcam, USB ... wow. After upgrading to a slightly newer Linux kernel (2.6.30), wireless now comes up correctly after being suspended, and keyboard control of screen brightness works. I can't think of anything that doesn't work other than multitouch gestures on the touchpad. Battery life seems to be as good as when running Windows. Speed for the tools of my trade is great when running Linux: emacs, X windows, SSH, Firefox and Flash.
Unlike a previous reviewer, I am in no sense a "casual" user; I do software development and am always a power user of software. But not a gamer or graphics guy who needs PhotoShop. I tend to view my laptop as a window to development servers using X and SSH, and a window to the Web using a browser. For those uses, this little laptop is entirely capable. So both the casual and the geeky can find happiness with the Acer 4810.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lot of positives - even though my DVD burner is defective, July 13, 2009
I have owned it for 10 days now.
Just noticed !!! the DVD burner does NOT Burn DVDs... I did a full system recovery, and nope...just can't !!! I would leave three stars if I could change my rating because Acer warranty helpline is toll free, easily reachable and extremely courteous. I have yet to see if international warranty is worth something cause I took it back to France or do I have to mail it in the US...I got a lemon, it happens.
Let's forget this unusual defect, and focus on the rest
The positives :
- I like the keyboard a lot (flat keys, well spaced, shiny surface...yes, fingerprints stay, and stays cool)
- very silent fan
- very bright screen with the led backlight, no prob to work outdoors
- computer top, and screen don't get hot at all
- two finger operations on the touchpad (zoom in and out with two fingers, keep scrolling with circular motion, backward and forward with right and left swipe)
- neat design (overall), looks smart, feels sturdy
- audio jack connections on the side
- nice specs (320 gb of hd, 3gb ddr3)
- great battery life
- fast enough
- stable system
- audio digital output
- hdmi and vga video output
- it did reboot once on its own (crashed) when fast forwarding a video on vlc, but I cannot make it happen again, I believe it has been fixed by the windows updates (anyway, this would be a vista issue that would get solved by windows 7 upgrade, or did already get solved buy the automatic updates)
- free upgrade to windows 7 (the form is in the computer box, whether the reseller tells you about it or not)
The negative
- sound quality is nice, but not loud
- no firewire port ! come-on, how do you connect your camcorder - sure, you can by an adapter
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