Asking for advices on TravelMate 4101LMi ?

Hi, everybody,

I'm going to buy my first ntb with £800. I mainly use it for word processing, running program--Matlab, going outside for presentation, sometimes, listening music and watching movies. I have an option-Acer TravelMate 4101LMi, the specifications are listed as follows:

• Mobile Intel® Centrino™ technology
• Intel® Pentium® M 730 1.6 GHz processor
• 15" XGA TFT LCD Display
• 60GB HDD
• 512MB DDR (2*256)
• DVD-RW Duel Drive
• ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X700 graphics card with 64 MB
• LAN and 802.11g WLAN
• Microsoft® Windows® XP Home
• Weight-2.9 kg
• Average Run Time with battery-4 hour(s)

But I'm not sure this is a good choice, particularly I didn't find any comments on TravelMate 4101LMi at this forum, does this mean this ntb is not a good one ? Another concern is its build quality, I read some posts about this, is Acer's build quality good or not ? Any replies would be very appreciated !!

 

i should hopefully be receiving mine today

i'll post a review and pictures later once i have got it and had a play. [ ]

the spec's are certainly great for the price at which i got it (£779)

 

Thank you so much ! I am waiting for your review, then I'll made a decisoin.

Shangming Zhou

 

ok, i've had the laptop a day and im finally up to speed.

had abit of a problem to start with with the hitachi hard drive making random clicking noises when the pointer was comming off the platter in power saving mode (driving me insane but apparantly its common in all hitachi based notebooks... acer, dell, hp, ibm)

however after hours of searching for a sollution i finally found one, which can be found in another tread on this forum.

ok into the main review,

the laptop itself is very stylish. the screen, much larger than i expected though (however strangely look's alot smaller when closed) im more than happy with the display its very sharp and clear. the keyboard takes a while to get used to as with any laptop with its compact design, however after only a day's use im already almost up to the same speed of a standard qwerty keyboard.

the laptop comes with 4 quick launch buttons all of which fully customisable. and also a quick link to turn wireless on / off and the same with a bluetooth connection (sold seperate) and a tv-out function which allows for linking up to a tv to watch dvd's etc and an externa vga output is also included for linking up any external display be it a monitor or projector. the audio in / outputs are based at the front of the laptop along with two decent sounding stereo speakers (not tried them on max volume, however on standard there more than ok) and also something i didnt notice in the original spec, the laptop also comes with an inbuilt microphone.

the laptop comes with a dual dvdrw (+r / -r) which with a firmware upgrade im sure will be able to also turn dual.

the laptop comes with a 60GB hard drive which can be upgraded, after i configured the settings to stop the disk clicking it did seem to inpact on performance however not by a considerable amount.

display wise, it comes well equipped with an ati radeon x600, although ive seen some sites display with x700's the acer website also confirms its default shipped with the x600 however ive yet to do any game benchmarks these will come within the next couple of days.

all in all, the laptop is certainly quick... performance wise id rank it above my previous athlon 2500+ by a long shot id put the 1.6ghz around a 2.8ghz P4 or possibly a 3ghz and for the price you cant really go wrong. if your looking for a budget centrino based laptop, at a great price along with a reasonable spec.. this is the best of the acer bunch and considering the aspire 1890 series is almost equaly spec'd and quite a big difference in price the travelmate is an absolute steal.

ill post some pictures tomorrow of the laptop when i have good light.

- gary

 

Many thanks muppetmaster. Your comments are valuable. I'm waiting your further review about its performance on benchmarks. I've read your solution on clicking problem. Actually, I heard some complaints before on 4500 series about this kind of clicking noise problem, just see one: http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=10523.

After you fixed the clicking noise problem, could you please open a webpage that has flash, such as Acer's own page, then have a check and confirmation?

Other main compaints about Acer ntb I heard include washed colors on screen, unclear sound when playing music. Could you please have a check whether these problems exist in 4101LMI ?

Looking forward to reading you !

 

Nice quick review!

How is the battery usage so far?

And theres not much point of speakers on a notebook, most times, they are really really crappy. getting external speakers or headphones are better.

Washed colours? Dead pixels?


Hope to get some screenshots too? [8D]

 

sorry for the late pictures on this one, ill have them up tomorrow. had a really busy week!

btw i ran superpi today on the laptop and after an uptime of about 3h, various installs and mcafee virus scanner and firewall and mirc / msn open i still managed to achieve a score of:

SuperPI Score on 2M: 1 minute 54 seconds

i compared this with the hardware forum results and found to my shock, and also happiness that the new sonoma 1.6ghz (533 FSB) centrino is actually faster than a dothan 1.7ghz (400mhz FSB) in the superpi test by around 10/20 seconds. the result was also faster than a P4 3.0Ghz / Athlon 64 3000+ by around 20/30 seconds.. must be the massive 2MB cache [ ]

very very chuffed [ ]

 

Hi, muppetmaster, congratulations !

In addation to the pictures, how about the problems: washed colours? Dead pixels? unclear sound when playing music?

 

Not to be a downer, but my 1.7 Dothan Acer 303XMi turned out virtually identical PI 2M time of 1:55 (with NAV2004 and all 83 processes running).