8204 mini-review

Okay, well I'd been saying I'd do this for just over a week now, and well here it is. There seem to be a good number of full reviews out for this laptop now, so I'm not going to bother with all the details, just my main points, things I like, things I dislike, etc etc.

For reference, I'm comparing things to my prior laptop, Toshiba Satelite 1955-S805.

Lets go ahead and get my negative points out first, then the posatives.

1. Express Card falls out, this seems to be a stupid annoyance given that it's just a piece of plastic (I assume a real express card wouldn't fall out?) but it's somewhere that I do tend to pickup the laptop, so it warrents being marked as a negative.

2. Lack of hardware volume control, almost every other laptop I've had has been a toshiba and has had a hardware volume control. This one only has software volume control and I do miss it, not vastly, but it is a missing "nice touch"

3. Card reader slot, while the card reader is great, the fact that the door sits open when a card is in the slot is really bad given the position of the slot (right at the front of the laptop). I'm pretty sure that some day I'm going to forget and that little door is going to come right off. If I can figure out how I'll post a picture.

4. 1394 port at the front of the laptop, This causes me some irritating again because to plug things in I have to be much more careful because the front of the laptop is much more often touching something (or close to touching) where the sides and rear are not.

5. Acer power monitor doesn't report time or percentage of life left, I know it's minor, but with all the bundled software on the machine and the fact that some of the standard windows functionality (like battery life) doesn't show, you'd think they'd include the battery life/time left as a popup from the taskbar, nope, you have to open up the power monitor to check battery life, minor but irritating.

Okay, that's about it for the bad stuff (at least that I've encounted so far) now the good stuff.

1. This machine flies! I mean it really flies, I can do video editing quickly and easily, I don't have to wait for my system to catch up, and I can apply filters to videos (Vegas 6 is my editor of choice) and see the effects of the filter properly in playback (no dropping of frames) this is fantastic as editing underwater video requires use of filters quite often, and being able to see the outcome of a filter without having to render the full video is VERY useful.

2. Did I mention, this machine flies, I can play Everquest II with full detail on just about everything at a comfortable frame rate, this I like.

3. Wireless on/off switch, I know others have not seen the point, but personally I like it, I like being able to quickly and easily disable my wireless access so that I can do something else without worrying at all about what traffic is coming in (or out) of my PC.

4. IR port, just a side note, but a lot of PC's seem to be stopping including an IR port, I like IR ports because both my PDA and cell phone use IR ports and with an IR port I can wirelessly sync both to my PC.

Overall I really like it, it's a nice design, sleek shape, solid feel to it, and performs well. I'm very happy with my new toy.

 

When you say no hardware volume control - I'm sure you noted that you can use FN+UpArrow to turn the voume up and FN+DownArrow to turn the volume down. Thinkpads have dedicated buttons for up and down volume, but I think this works just as well.

 

Yes, that was noted, however that's still dependant on software, i.e. you can't turn the volume up and down while booting, you can't turn the volume up and down in some programs (because they disable all hotkeys).

It's a minor issue, but something I did get used to with my toshibas, having a physical wheel that controls volume outside of windows.

 

It's true there's no pop-up from the notification tray, but the actual notification tray icon changes as the battery depletes - essentially the little green battery icon is a bar graph. If you double-click the notifcation tray icon there are very detailed battery stats displayed, including estimated remaining time at the current settings, in standby and for hibernation.

Now for some negatives you assumedly haven't come across yet:

1. The Bluetooth adaptor drops out every 20 minutes to 2 hours. In fact I've never had it remain on for more than 2 hours. Very frustrating when you're playing games and your uber-expensive bluetooth mouse drops out.

2. The sound level/quality from the speakers is uninspiring at best, but even worse is the terrible output levels when using headphones or line-out - you can barely hear the headphone output even and mediocre ambient noise levels. If you want to use headphones you'll need to invest another $30-$100 on a USB sound card, a Soundblaster PCMCIA card, or a set of USB headphones.

3. The gravisense hard drive protection / anti-theft feature does not work properly - you'll get either the protection mode or the anti-theft mode to work, but not both.

4. The Windows based part of the Platinum Secure suite (smart card security system) fails to detect the smart card in 90% cases, forcing you to shut down the machine using the power button (unsafe). Note that the BIOS based Platinum Secure software works fine though.

Just my 2c

 

Interesting, I've not run into this problem at all, the speakers seemed, okay, nothing great, but not terrible either, sound through the headphones worked just fine, I put the volume at 1 and it works just fine, then again I have good headphones? (ESHURE E2C)

Everything else you posted about I've not tried to use, so wouldn't expect to have experienced trouble with. My main annoyance so far has to be the amount of pre-loaded stuff on the laptop, I don't think I need all these programs, also the wory that if I change the hard drive to NTFS that the recovery DVD I burnt will be useless, I wish I could get a straight answer on that.