Acer Aspire 4810 Timeline Laptop Review
November 20th, 2009
Acer Aspire 4810 Timeline 14.0-Inch Laptop Review from Gregory J Grubbs. Great laptop for linux, awesome battery life, 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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You may also want to read Sony VAIO VGN-SR510G/H 13.3-Inch Laptop from l5creative.com site.
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