Acer Aspire Timeline Owner's Lounge

JR.com has it.

 

A 32-bit OS can only address 2^32 bytes of memory. That is 4GB. But the motherboard uses some of that memory address space for I/O (mostly buffers between devices and the OS) - the video card for example works that way. You copy 4 bytes per pixel to a certain area in memory and presto - the pixels appear in color on the screen. Those 1366x768 pixel times 4 bytes per pixel eat up address space from the 4GB available. It's not MS doing that, it is Intel too, and nature...

 

It's the factory default intel video driver. I tried this, then I also Upgraded the driver due to the CPU issues, but neither seem to allow my CTRL+ALT and arrow to work.

Thanks.

 

Actually, neither has it in stock and the models are slightly different. Newegg's model is the AS3810T-8503 with 4gb ram/320gb hd compared to 2gb ram/250gb hd on JR's AS3810T-8640. Given that difference, shouldn't JR's be cheaper than Newegg's instead of the other way around?

 

Who is better to buy from, overall... JR.com or Newegg?

 

I've personally never bought from JR.com, but Newegg's never failed me. However, keep in mind that Newegg only sells the SU2700 and SU3500 models (though the latter is out of stock for now). I can see in your sig that your have a Vaio with a P8600... you're going to see a SEVERE drop in performance going down to either of these two models. If I were you, I would wait for Newegg to receive the SU9400 Timeline models which compares to mid-range Intel dual-cores, and is far better than the other two single core models. Just my two cents.

JR.com had the SU9400 in stock before, but they're waiting on a new shipment to arrive. Computers4sure.com seems to have it in stock, but its more expensive, and I can't comment on their credibility.

 

Does anyone know any tools to control the fan speed other than SpeedFan? That one doesn't recognize the 3810T fan.

My Eee uses eeectl, but that's not really an option for the Timeline.

Everest only does diagnostics, so that doesn't help either.

 

Try a1ctl.

That aside Acer Timeline is already super cooled IMO you can leave the cooling to the fan without intervention.

 

I'm more concerned about the fan running all the time on AC power. The processor stays the same temp as on battery, but the fan kicks in nonetheless. Setting the processor cooling policy in Windows 7 to passive doesn't help.

That's why I want a tool to manually control the fan speed, so I can turn it off if the CPU temp is, say, below 50 celsius.

Let's see if a1ctl can accomplish that. I'm a bit worried using a tool that's for a different notebook...

 

Here's the link for the 13.3" dual core

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0314010

Going to pick it up now. 3 Left at my local store.

Rather spend the extra $$$ for dual core. Wish the 14" model had dual core option and built in blue tooth in the US.

 

Hey thanks, I appreciate that! -- but -- I'm now thinking about keeping the VAIO as my main 'puter and getting a cheaper netbook as my travel/toy/bathroom laptop. Right now I'm eyeballing the Acer Aspire One AO751h.

 

I picked up the Sony viao for comparison. Screen is nice, keyboard is nice, more ports as options. What I didn't like is that it ran hot, just without doing anything. It's also heavy and bulkier, which is why I changed my mind on the the Acer's 15" model, with these wider screens, 15" might as well be a 17" model. I do like to have height as well, but seems everyone is making these to watch movies on. Oh well. Didn't even get to the battery since I've ruled this out. Nice to have dual core, but I'm now leaning towards the 13.3" with the dual core 9400. Just wish the 14" model had it, but for traveling, the 13.3" will probably be fine. It's bigger than my 12" HP tablet with longer battery life. It will be interesting to see if dual core heats the notebook up more. Blue tooth is also nice at least for me to have it link to my cell phone as a modem.

 

My experience was J&R was excellent. I ordered it last Thursday about midnight (When my paycheck went to my bank account) and It was shipped Friday night. Was at my house on Monday at 10:19 AM

 

This explains why battery with Windows 7 is not as good yet:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-xp,2339-5.html

Told you so

 

question for people with a timeline. i just got mine a couple of days ago, so far i've been pretty happy with my 3810T (su3500). when i was trying to install windows 7 RC 64-bit though, my notebook would always BSOD once it started trying to "unpack the files" (people who've installed it should know what i'm talking about). the strange thing is, i couldn't manually power off the computer once it BSODed. normally you press and hold the power button to shut it off, but that did nothing. thus, i was forced to unplug the battery in order to power it off. anyone else experience similar?

fortunately, 32-bit windows 7 installed okay. thank god, because i had to delete the erecovery partition before windows 7 let me continue.

 

A €499 bargain

A French shop is listing Acer's 13-inch Timeline with a Celeron 723 CPU, and the price is an astounding €499.

The Timeline 3410T packs 3GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive and a 13-inch 1366x768 screen and it weighs just 1.65 kg.

At €499 it is truly great value for money, as it costs as much as some high end netbooks.

We're still not seeing it in the rest of Europe, but you can probably expect it in retail soon.
http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14513/41/

 

This one seems better, a little more expensive but a bit more specs

https://www.pccomponentes.com/ACER_ASPIRE_TIMELINE_3810T_SU3500_4GB_320GB_13_3_.html

Edit: Is the one listed on that French site with taxes included? The one I link to cost 584 euros WITH taxes, 503 euro without the tax.

 

But that's the normal SU3500 model. The € 499 model is new, never seen before.

 

Right. I found it for €489(tax included) on aceronline.es:

http://www.aceronline.es/shop/aspire-timeline-3410t723g25n-p-1750.html

Edit: The same site has the 3810T even cheaper than the price from that link from my previous post - €569(tax included)

 

Are you kidding me ?
Celeron?
As if Core 2 Solo isn't bad enough.

 

I just got an Acer 4810T from Costco in Virginia for $600.. It has the lowly su2700 and gma 4500 so I wasn't expecting much more than 720p video. However, it seems to run the amazon microsoft clip at 1080 well (there might be a hint of hesitation when the woman is moving through the jungle). I was surprised. Do you think more demanding 1080p will not play?

Performance so far has been snappy. WIFI pickup with type N is excellent and an order of magnitude better than anything I've tried (exception is one hp with type n). I was even able to get my old Dlink wifi adapters to work with some protesting from the Acer. Not sure how much I'm missing not having the SU9400 duo and wish I had BT, but so far so good. Costco's excellent return policy is why I buy there, nut perhaps in this case they are slipping me a SU2700 instead of su9400.

 

Hi Dart22. You said the 4810t was superfast with xp, did you get a chance to play any HD video clips? My 4810t with vista home comes very close to playing the 1080 Amazon HD clip from microsoft, with just a little hesitation in the early scenes.

 

robandjeanne:
Just played microsoft's Coral reef 1080 wmv on my "new" 3810T with SU3500
it played without any stutter or any issue's. and that was on a clean vista install !
Just try it with Zoom player v6 using EVR or Halli as the video renderer
(Options>Advanced options>playback>video&subs)

www.inmatrix.com

 

I can't believe Acer doesn't brag about 1080p performance. It's reassuring to know that a su3500 will play 1080p because I won't feel I missed out on too much not having the duo su9400.

By the way. What bloatware have people removed from their Acers? Is there a theory that some of this bloatware at times makes the acer unresponsive? Particularly I had neard rumors about mcafee slowing things down. If mcafee is on a trial basis, do people plan on uninstalling it?

I believe I saw this unresponsiveness at Costco on their display 4810t. It was taking forever for the dialog box that allows personalizing display settings. I actually thought the machine was broken and couldn't believe any pc was that slow. Perhaps the display acer had entered into the unresponsive state others have noticed where nearly 100% of the cpu is busy.

 

Has anyone installed the new BIOS version (1.2) on the 4810TZ? I'm tempted to install, but Acer tech supported specifically told me not to update it (which seemed odd) and I unfortunately the BIOS doesn't include any release notes so I can't even see what new features are included in this BIOS.

 

Yes removing Mcafee would be the first thing to do.

With ctrl-alt-del you can check how many processes are running in the background. I like to keep it around 30-34. Ccleaner is a nice tool that can disable startup processes (make sure not to install the extra software that comes with it). There are other ways to do it but this is the simplest imo.

 

I totally agree with Phil.
If you want to install any other anti-Virus program, you mush uninstall McAfee first for the compatibility issue.
Especially Kaspersky won't install at all if McAfee is there.

 

Greetings Everyone.

First of all, I would like to say that this thread has been a blessing. After a ton of research (much of which has been done on this thread =p), I have placed an order for a 14" Timeline.

I do have one question that I didn't see addressed in this thread. This would be my first laptop with the so-called, 'chicklet' style keyboard. I have messed with a few of these before and I find them to either be hit or miss. The only times I feel that they are a miss is when the spacing is too great between the keys. From what I have seen in pictures, the spacing doesn't look to be that big at all and I don't anticipate it to be an issue.

How does everyone like the keyboard on the Timeline?

 

2Point0,

Welcome to NBR! Glad to hear that this thread has been helpful to you Now I don't have a Timeline myself, though I plan to get one by the end of August (for college). From what I've heard from the countless reviews I've read/watched though, it seems like there's a general consensus that the Timeline's keyboard (on any given model) is pretty darn good. I'm sure you'll be able to judge for yourself though when your Timeline arrives.

In the meantime, does anyone know if the trackpad on the Timeline can be reprogrammed to use 2-finger scrolling (instead of the spiral motion)?

 

The keyboard of the Timeline is a bit too glossy imo. Actually, any gloss on a keyboard is too glossy, dunno why they ruined it by making it a smudge/oil/blarg magnet.

 

Yea, I hear you on that one. More incentive to keep it clean?

Aside from the gloss on the keys, how do you like the feel of the keyboard lowteckh?

 

The keyboard is really nice. It's quite different from the regular keyboards because the keys are all flat, and it's not really a chiclet style because the keys aren't really seperated like Sony and Apple. SO it's a bit of a change, but I love it now.

I have to say that I'm not a touch typist, at least not using the traditional 10 finger approach. So maybe if you're used to that, it might prove difficult to adapt to the new keyboard because it doesn't give you as much feedback. But you placed your order anyway, so you can see if you like it when you get it...

The gloss on the keyboard is really quite annoying at first, but after using it for a while everything is smugged, so you can't see it as much. Either that, or I just don't care anymore.

And if we're talking about looks, be carefulif you plan to remove the stickers from the notebook. I tried removing the leftover glue with rubber (which worked fine on my 3 previous notebooks) and scratched the surface pretty badly. So I had to replace the Vista/Intel stickers with different, better ones.

 

Hi, all
I am glad that I am half 4810TG (SU9400) owner now.
My family went to visit a computer show in Taipei (7/3-7/6) and bought 4810TG
This laptop is for my mom (but I will borrow it from her to play around in August )
=====================
Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel@ Core 2 Duo SU9400 (1.4Ghz)
Mobile Intel® GS45 Express Chipset
802.11 a/b/g/Draft-N
Wireless WiFi Link 5100 Wi-Fi
ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4330 512M GDDR3
4GB DDR3 1066
320GB
Card reader: SD/MMC/MS/xD/MS PRO
Web Cam: 100mgega
Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR
ODD
6-Cell battery
=========================
Price: 1153US (tax included) + free gifts (4GB USB drive, keyboard protecter, cleaning kit)

btw, 3810TG (Su3500) just start to be on sale (7/4) in Taiwan
(official price: 921$ US; but people can get cheaper deal in some local stores, like around 796$US (tax included))

The following link is from a person who bought it:
http://lawrence-yeh.blogspot.com/2009/07/acer-aspire-timeline-3810tg-13.html

Because I don't have 4810TG in my hand, I can not test any tests for you guys. Sorry about this (I will have chance to play it at end of august; then I will borrow it for 4 months~ )

 

I went to Fry's today and got the 3810TZ with the SU2700. They had a deal where you got a $50 gift with the purchase of any Timeline so I jumped on it. I was going to wait for newegg to get the SU3500 back in stock but I ended up selling my macbook faster than I thought so I couldn't wait for them to get it in stock. So far I am in love with this keyboard. The keyboard was the main reason I didn't want to get rid of my mac but I found the keyboard on Timeline's to be just as good.

I got 2 finger scroll to work by installing the twofingerscroll app from google code and it works like a charm. I also have 2 finger right click enabled and it works perfectly. The touchpad buttons are kind of stiff but with 2 finger right click I don't have to use the buttons at all. I haven't decided If I am going to reformat and put Windows 7 RC on it just yet as most people are losing 2 hours of battery life with it over Vista.

The machine did come with quite a bit of crapware installed but once I uninstalled everything it got quite a bit zippier. So far I have been playing around with it for a couple of hours but I am extremely impressed with this machine especially for the price. Acer definitely has a winner with the new Timelines.

 

I'm still in the process of uninstalling some of the crapware on the Timeline. Can anyone tell me what crapware they uninstalled?

I already uninstalled some things, like Acer Games and Mcaffee, but there's a number of programs by Acer that I don't know whether or not I want to uninstall.

 

I got my 3810TZ at Fry's too, and had to fight the salesdroids off with their warranty offers. I did not get the $50 gift card! I bought the machine June 30.

There is a lot of crapware installed and the windows patches are far from complete. You have to download literally hundreds of megabytes (SP2).
I uninstalled the backup application and about 20 useless games, and put the latest VGA drivers on along with a newer BIOS. THis cured the 100% interrupt CPU usage problem I was having. Although Intel makes a big percentage of the nervous system of this laptop, they don't seem to be too good at the software driving it.
I also have a problem of the wireless disconnecting when on battery power. I have turned off power management when on battery and hope that helps and doesn't reduce battery life too much.

 

Funny thing I realized the other day, for the free Windows 7 upgrade they're going to send me a copy of Windows 7 on DVD when my computer doesn't have a DVD drive...

 

I read Microsoft may be distributing USB keys, as many notebooks now don't have an optical drive.

 

Yeah I had to fight the salesguy as well with their extended warranties but I found the 3 year one for $139 to not be that bad of a deal. I remember paying $189 for applecare for my macbook which I used a lot in the 3 years I owned it (replaced 2 batteries, cdrw drive, hard drive, logic board when a firmware update screwed it up). I am contemplating to either go for the Fry's 3 year one for $139 or the acer one for $99.

It was funny also how he was trying to sell me a 10 pack of dvdr discs so I could make the restore cds when the machine doesn't come with an optical drive .

 

Hey guys, i'm gonna order one the SU9400 Timeline as soon as i can find one in stock somewhere...

Anyways, i was wondering if the timeline can play the sims 3, even on low settings? Or should i just wait (maybe a long time) for the Ati 3300 version. Can that even run the sims 3? I don't really know much about computer, so sorry for all the questions.

Regardless, i'll still buy one before or during fall semester. Seems like the perfect laptop for college.

Thanks ahead of time!

 

If you want to be sure to be able to play some games, get a version with SU9400 and ATI HD4330. That should be able to play most older games and some new games with not to steep requirements (incl. Sims 3) at low or medium settings.

And it should still deliver great battery life because someone mentioned they have switchable graphics.

 

Hello, all.
I was wondering about the self-discharge rate of the battery on Timeline.
Many laptop battery discharges at about 1-5% per day when it is shut off and disconnected from AC (no Lan wake up and no Mouse wake up selected).
What is your observation about the self-discharge rate of Timeline?

 

Yeah that seems like itd be the best bet for me. Not really a huge gamer but i want to be able to play diablo3 when it comes out (diablo2 was a huge part of my middle school life haha). Anyways the wait is just killing me, sold off my desktop a couple weeks ago since i'm going off to college this fall. Been stealing my family member's laptop for the past couple weeks and they're getting a bit annoyed.

Thanks for the advice.

 

Yeah, Diablo 3...

I hope it runs on the X4500MHD. Else, I will have to get a desktop for that game. Unless they cripple the LAN mode like in Starcraft 2.

Diablo 2 and middle school... same here!

 

Much lower than Aspire 3935 due to the CULV and the GS45 board.
The radeon 4330HD my estimate superior or on par with the 9400M G on macbooks

 

Yeah ever since i found out about Diablo3 earlier this year its really been screwing me over trying to find a good school laptop. It's hard to find a good combination of specs/price for me in the thin and light category, im hoping the timeline is the one.

 

@weinter: I think you were the one who posted about customizing the touch buttons. Could you please give us more specific infos on that? I found some registry entries, but it would be nice to know which ones are safe to modify.

Thanks!

 

Hi all, I currently own a Sony TZ u7600 w/2Gb RAM

I was looking to get a replacement ultraportable due to the tremendous heat the TZ produces. It becomes so annoying on the lap. SO I have a couple of questions about this laptop.

Which of the 3 versions on the JR site would give me performance similar to the TZ? I only surf the internet with it, occasionaly watch movies/youtube videos. Most of the time I am using onenote and powerpoint, and listening to podcasts of the lectures from college.

Also, equally important, how hot does this laptop get on the bottom. Is it ever really uncomfortable? I am now in a lecture hall all day with no desks, so the laptop must be on the lap all day and lectures last 6 hrs straight.

any help would be appreciated.

 

Sorry, but I meant the self-discharge rate of the battery when the laptop is shut off.

 

Hi fellow Time line owners

Need a favor from any one who has a 3810T configured with xp pro: does ur timeline come with epower management installed?
can't seem to find it listed on acer support site

I need it for my xp install otherwise i'm afraid i might not get good battery life!

Thanks