Acer Travelmate P645

Do I need a 7mm or will a 9 mm do ?

EDIT: taking a closer look at the laptop without even opening it, and considering the thickness. I am sure it is 7mm only.

 

The charms thing in Windows 8.1 was driving me nuts too, but I found instructions on how to install the latest Acer touchpad driver. Because the driver isn't signed correctly, you have to put Windows into a mode whereby it will accept unsigned drivers, and then immediately afterwards install the driver. There's an option in the touchpad settings to disable edge swiping, and sanity is restored.

 

Got my P645-SG yesterday. so far so good.
Design and assembly are well executed. Keyboard is nice, much better than my old Sony SVS15 and a bit more responsive than my wife Samsung series 9.
Screen is all about quality, bright with correct colors, but I must be used for such small estate. Bigger difference than I expected compared to my old 15.6"
Of course, after 10 minutes playing with Win8.1 and the non sens UI, I have formatted the damn thing to put a fresh Win7 x64. Everything works well except the intel AHCI driver (my windows has a newer .net framework than requested by the driver). In consequence, without AHCI, the NXP NFC driver doesn't install. I will look later to solve this issue as NFC is not important at all for me.
Battery life looks good. in power saver mode, I worked 3 hours on Office and + surfing the web and I still had 6 hours remaining in the windows battery widget. When I will install my pro software, I should reach 6 hours of my typical workload, which is perfect for me.
All in one, very satisfied by this 1st day with my new toy.

 

Hello ArthurG,

Where did you buy your P645-SG ?

 

I bought it from an online shop in Shanghai: http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=45209035270
Mine shows a manufacturing date of first week of April and everything is fine.
Now that I'm satisfied by this laptop, tomorrow I will bring it to a certified Acer service center in Guangzhou (where I live) to change the 1TB HDD by a Crucial MX200 1TB SSD (my model comes with a second HDD, so no issue to find the cage or the cable).
Something to note, in China, Acer Travelmates carry 3 years warranty with the option to extend it for 2 more years (for around $100)

 

Thanks for your reply.
You wrote that your model has an I7-5600U but in seems that it has
I7-5500U.
For the price (around 1450 euros) it's a well stocked laptop.
Have fun ;D

 

sorry my mistake, I got 17-5500U and yeah for the specs, I can't complain about the price.
My TravelMate is back from Acer service center and I have now MX200 1TB SSD as second drive (the original second drive was a WD Blue WD10SPCX). I also paid $80 for 3 years full warranty (all parts covered, battery included) so my laptop is finally ready to work. I may change the original M2.2280 slowish 256GB Kingston SSD by a 512GB MX200 down the road, but for now I'm fine. I particularly like the screen and the autonomy. Yesterday I worked nearly continuously from 10AM to 6PM (office stuff) and I still had 20% battery. Definitively a keeper.

 

I just upgraded my p645 by adding a Samsung Evo 850 1 TB ssd. Things look good. Got this cable:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3AN14S5715

Putting the cable is tricky. You need to open all screws in the back. The cable snaps in gently into the connector marked JHDD1. The end with the wire and ribbon-type things goes towards the WiFi card.

So looking at this image, http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ProductImageCompressAll300/A3AN_1_20131030246925299.jpg
the WiFi card would be at the bottom..

But then your cable may be different from mine, so just double check.

Also, it will only support 7mm or thinner drives.. so a 9.5 mm drive won't fit.

EDIT: pics of AS SSD benchmarks.
Putting also those of the Liteon builtin SSD and my 256 GB SDXC card for comparison

 

Can you describe the instructions for this. The charms thing was the single reason I went back to Win7. I would love to go back to Win8.1 but only if I can disable the stupid charms feature.

Also out of curiosity, what genius at Synaptics or Acer thought its a good idea to remove this feature? Anyone knows?

 

Here's a page describing how to install the Synaptics driver on Windows 8.1:
http://superuser.com/questions/690671/synaptics-windows-8-1-updating-synaptics-failed

 

Hi, I've just installed a Samsung EVO 850 (1TB) in my P645. I first armed myself with spudgers (from Amazon - "eTrader Direct - 2 iN 1 Apple iPod iPhone iPad METAL SPUDGER Opening, Pry, Repair Tool"), which I think some relatives will be getting for Christmas because they 'spudger' is such a cool name and they're satisfying bits of machined metal. With one of these, it was easy to pry up the old hard disk from the end opposite the connector.

I fitted the Samsung SSD into a USB 3 enclosure and used the Samsung migration software (included with the drive) to copy my Windows 8.1 hard drive, which took about 3 hours for 400GB. Then I replaced the HDD with the SSD having put the rubber sleeve back on the SSD - it's a tight fit and it needed a bit of squishing to get the rubber to disappear sufficiently.

To my amazement, it booted quickly into Windows. I fully expected to have to mess around with 3rd party boot recovery tools given I've heard so many dire stories about migration. I checked that the drive was aligned by dividing the partition starting offset by 4096, and it was, so the Samsung software must have handled that.

Finally I installed Samsung Magician, followed the advice about virtual memory (though I gave it a maximum of 4GB) and switched off indexing. I didn't enable RAPID since I've read this is mostly for PCs with slower SATA controllers. The drive firmware was already up-to-date. I then disabled Magician from starting on bootup using CCleaner. I also uninstalled the caching software that uses the small built-in SSD, since that's now redundant.

Performance seems very respectable so far though I haven't yet done heavy-duty work. It's a huge relief that the whole thing was hassle-free. Thanks in part to to the spudger...

 

Hey guys,

I am thinking on buying a P645-SG but there are a few things holding me back. First of all the keyboard and the trackpad, there are a lot of confliting reviews regarding this point. Is the keyboard just ok, or is it a major flaw on the notebook?

I also would like to know from someone that has it if the antennas for a 3g (wwan) upgrade are alredy installed in the models that doesn't come with it alredy. If no, is it possible to instal the antennas?

Thanks ygor

 

I like the feel of the keyboard, although someone else on this thread reported that his broke after a while. The trackpad is fine although it's faintly annoying that it's not in the centre, since occasionally I find my left hand resting on the edge which can cause unwanted zooming. No idea about the 3G antenna I'm afraid.

 

@kogumelow - I, too, like the keyboard, and frankly I don't see why it was pinged in the review. I can't say much about the trackpad, since I use a bluetooth mouse most of the time. As far as the inadvertent zooming, it's easy to lock the trackpad out with a Fn-F7 command. The few times I use this on my lap without peripherals, I find that command comes in very handy.

Back to the keyboard, I find it has relatively short keystroke travel but there is nothing vague about any of the keyboard strokes. The solid build means zero - and I mean ZERO - keyboard flex. Can't tell you how nice that is coming off my old VAIO EB. So IMO, the keyboard is very nice to work with.

 

I haven't been active on this thread in a while, but figured I'd come back asking about Win10. I saw that Acer's support site only lists a few drivers for Win10 for this model, and importantly doesn't list a video driver from AMD, only one from Intel. I'm guessing that means no switchable graphics anymore, which would be a dealbreaker for me (and, I assume, many others who got the M8750 version).

Has anybody tried an upgrade so far? Were the drivers mostly taken care of by Windows itself or did you have to use the meager selection from Acer support?

My P645 still works fine BTW, though the battery wore relatively quickly (something like 9% wear for maybe 30-40 cycles) IMO. Not a big deal, I still get 8+ hours of battery life, which is sufficient for my travel needs.

 

I would also be interested any response to MrPlus' preceding post. Added to that, I wonder if the new OS might affect the operation of the dedicated hard-code Launch Manager buttons (next to the power button) as well as the blue Fn-keys. I suspect those functions may possibly be BIOS-controlled and hence unaffected by the OS migration, but that's only my guess.

 

OK, so I installed Win 10 to my P645, and it was a pretty smooth process. First, I did an upgrade using the (annoying) Windows 10 tool that gets downloaded to Win7 (mostly whether you want it or not). Then I let it register itself and waited about a day or 2 to be safe. Then I did a clean install with a Win10 x64 ISO from MSDN, and it registered properly, so now I can reinstall anytime without having to go through an upgrade.

In terms of drivers, Win 10 does a pretty great job. I didn't really get many if any drivers from Acer, Windows found them and installed them on its own. Switchable graphics works automatically once Windows is done with the drivers install. Everything else basically works in the same way. Win10 runs fast and boots incredibly fast on the P645, it's just about 10-15 seconds in total with BIOS time. I'm running things with secure boot on with no problems.

One thing I noticed is that the battery runtime seems to be a bit shorter than with Windows 7, even with optimizations to the settings to maximize power saving (the same I had done in Win7). As mentioned though, I'm pretty unhappy with Acer, as the battery I got is already at 20% wear (I just checked again) after ~50 cycles or so, maybe a bit more, but nowhere near 100. It's not really acceptable, but I don't think it's covered under warranty unfortunately. I'm planning to go back to Win7 in the near future as a result, because battery life is everything for me. I have a desktop to game on now so I'm set on that front, but the P645 worked well on relatively light games like Team Fortress 2.

Anyways, I hope that helps people out in terms of the process and making decisions to upgrading to Win10.

 

Thanks for that little review, MrPlus!

A couple of questions - was wondering how the hard-coded buttons work with Windows 10 (the buttons above the keyboard on the right side controlling the WiFi and Bluetooth radios, The "P" button that starts the Launch Manager, and the microphone button as well as the Fn-coded blue buttons).

I was also curious what application you use to determine the health of your battery.

 

For HW monitoring (incl. battery health), I use HWinfo64. One of the windows lists all the hardware on your machine, including the battery, and provides details on their specs.

I checked regarding the hard-coded buttons, and no, they do not work. Acer might release a driver for it under Win10 though. I've also not tried using Win8 drivers for it, even though that often works in Win10.

 

Love that HW Monitoring program - thanks! BTW, for my P645 purchased in May 2014 - which is usually plugged in but on battery once every week or two, it tells me that I am still at 90.5% of design capacity.

That's too bad about the hard-coded buttons - but I see no driving need to move to 10. If losing a chunk of battery life is the trade off to save a second or two on boot-up, then I'll sit on the sidelines for now and let the others do what is essentially in-the-field beta-testing. Very happy right now with how smoothly this machine and it's Windows 7 configuration are running....

 

Did anyone know where i can get "real" Win 10 x64 drivers for NXP and Intel Smart Connect?

THX

Edit:

Working drivers tested with Windows 10 x64

Smart Connect Drivers:
http://www.win-raid.com/t838f42-TIP-Modded-amp-signed-Intel-Smart-Connect-Technology-Drivers-v.html

NXP Drivers:
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us...ode=xps-15-9530&languageCode=EN&categoryId=CS

 

Apologies for the late reply, I haven't checked here in a while. @Brounoh, I haven't had any issues with sleep power loss.

 

Hello, i want ask you one question. In this laptop (ACER P645 wits core i5 5200u) i can use normal SODIM DDR3? It is memory with is not on 1,35v. Would this damage the laptop?
Sorry for my bad english.

Sent from my LG-D620 using Tapatalk

 

Hi, Dary96 -

I sometimes find that such technical questions are more quickly addressed in the Travelmate forum on Acer's site ( http://community.acer.com/t5/Travelmate/bd-p/travelmate). If I had any idea, I would help - but there are a few "gurus" there who I am sure would know.

If you go there and do get an answer, be sure to come back here and post it for this forum as well, since others may come in here with the same question.

 

I just bought my P645-SG, with the 1080p LED screen. I absolutely loved it until the following occurred...

...The screen is making me really nauseous, has anyone else had this problem? I've written about it here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/acer-p645-sg-led-screen-makes-me-sick-help.793504/

 

Dear Community,

I recently spilt water on my Travelmate P645M laptop and I have now 9 dead keys in the bottom left corner of the keyboard. My laptop is no longer under warranty so I had a few questions about keys replacement.

In fact, every key seems to be individualised on the keyboard (which is not disposable at once), so I am wondering about the following?



- Is it possible to repair only the broken keys one by one ? Without changing the full keyboard

- Is it possible that the keys will work again after a cleaning with alcohol for example (a thing I have seens on other forums) ?

- Is it possible to buy online the missing keys/the whole keyboard through official Acer store ?

- If willing to change the keys/keyboard by myself, should I first disconnect the non disposable battery by opening the laptopt (through the 10 screws at the bottom of the laptopt) and then replace the keys ?





Great thanks for your feedback

 

In my experience once you've got keys that don't work they don't recover and you will have to buy a completely new keyboard.

I've seen keyboards for different nationalities sold seperately, only concern I had when I wanted to swap the keyboards around is that on some laptops keyboards are sonic welded to palmrests, I don't know if this is the case with the P645, but if you do find out please let us know.

 

Hi everyone,

I'm going to buy a Samsung EVO 850 SSD for my travelmate, but I don't know anything about adding SSDs. Do I just buy the SSD and the 50.RZCN2.003 connector cable and then put it in the empty slot in the laptop? Does the SSD itself just fits inside the slot or do I need to buy a caddy or bracket for that?

 

Hi All,

does anyone know where to find jumper on the P645 board? I tried to reset Windows, because my drive was full, but something went wrong with the reset and I couldn't boot up anymore. All options in BIOS were grayed out except setting user password. After much research I think the laptop now expects the supervisor password to open up the TPM. However, I don't remember it and Acer doesn't want to help me since the laptop is 3 years old now and not covered by warranty anymore.

I tried looking for the CMOS battery to reset it, but could not find it either. I don't care if the ssd gets wiped, but right now my laptop is a brick.

 

@lordan5 Sorry, we can't help you. forum rules prohibit provide help in circumventing security measures.
Acer will surely help you although not for free.