NeutralAxis

This 15.6″ laptop is part of Acer’s Timeline series of very thin, very long battery life models based around a new Intel ultra low voltage Pentium processor.  Its supposed to get up to 8 hours on a charge and is 1″ thick.  I’ve managed to avoid Vista up to this point by buying custom systems where Vista wasn’t bundled, so this is also my first experience with Vista.  First impressions are not good.  [Update: Its going back to Walmart.  The "Moon" trailer in HD is my test video and it performed terribly trying to play it full screen.]  See my new post about the Gateway EC5801u and EC5802u which are nearly identical but higher performance.

First, the laptop looks great.  I really like the brushed aluminum look of the lid, and it really is just slightly over 1″ thick.  Weight is listed as 5.3 lbs.  My previous Gateway was 5.4lbs and tapered from 1.25″ to 1.5″.  I didn’t want anything heavier or thicker than that, so this fit the bill.  The battery compartment at the hinge edge is rounded and feels good in the hand carrying it.  The processor is Intel’s Pentium SU2700 which is part of a line of ultra low voltage processors they’ve come out with.  Battery life is estimated at 8 hours.  We’ll see how that goes.  It has a 320GB hard drive, 3GB RAM, dual layer DVD writer, and HDMI video output.  Its just a single core chip, so this isn’t a high horsepower machine, but I think it will do what I need.

The keyboard’s going to take some getting used to.  The keys remind me of “chiclet” keys of years past.  They’re flat and glossy on top and the little nubs on the F and J keys are just barely there.  I haven’t become accustomed to the hand position yet and keep typing hpnn;rfuhppl (that’s gobbledygook, one spot misplaced.)

In the first 5 hours of having this machine, I’ve had to go back to a system restore point already and had to to a hard reboot from the power button a couple of times when the system became unresponsive.  Acer doesn’t provide a restore CD and instead prompts you with a popup to make your own.  The popup didn’t appear until I’d already been using it for about an hour and had already installed Firefox, Quicktime, iTunes, etc.  The restore disc program then popped up with the helpful message that I should make the restore discs before using the machine.  At the completion of making the discs, it hung and wouldn’t reboot.  Windows reported that a “patch” was preventing the computer from booting and restored to a previous condition.  It also came with Internet Explorer 7 installed, so Windows wants to update that to IE8.  These must have been sitting in a warehouse for awhile.

There was also some weirdness in the BIOS.  After exploring it to see what was adjustable I tried to exit discarding changes in case I had inadvertently changed anything.  It wouldn’t allow me to do that.  The only way to leave the BIOS was to allow it to save changes.  A check online found that there had been 16 BIOS updates between mine and the most current.  Flashing the BIOS with the latest version fixed that problem.

I guess I don’t know if its typical of new computers, but the power management seems pretty sophisticated.  The user can create custom power profile with amazingly granular control over lots of different system components.  The machine comes with “balanced”, “power save” and “performance” profiles.  On the balanced profile, I’ve noticed that even plugged in, after a few minutes I get a popup that the optical drive has been powered down.  Pressing the eject button brings it back online.

[Update:  A Wubi install of Ubuntu went well and Ubuntu performed well, although video was still choppy.  The multi-touch gestures of the Synaptics trackpad were missing including the spiral scrolling feature which I learned to appreciate, and the special power saving features weren't available.]