Three Out Of Five Ain't Bad

I've had my new notebook for a few days now, time enough to get a good feel for it. So let's break it down into its components and see how it adds up.

Acer TravelMate 4202WLMi

Screen: Very Good (4/5)

It's big enough (15.4"), bright enough, and has no dead or stuck pixels. It has an anti-glare coating, which is great if you have to deal with glare, but does make the image slightly less sharp and the colours slightly less intense. So it depends on what you want to use it for, but it's more than adequate for programming and watching videos.

Processor: Good (3/5) to Very Good (4/5)

It's a 1.66GHz Core Duo. It's reasonably quick, though coming from a 1.4GHz Celeron M I don't notice a significant speedup. What I do notice is that when VMWare is running busily in the background, it has no effect on whatever else I'm doing. Which is exactly what I was after.

So for me, it's great; but people who aren't running large-scale web applications in a Linux virtual machine at the same time they are watching Kamichu! might be better off with the cheaper but slightly higher-clocked single-processor models.

Disk: Very Good (4/5)

120GB, 5400RPM, SATA. Works exactly as you'd expect. Nice and roomy, and reasonably fast for a notebook drive.

Battery Life: Excellent (5/5)

Okay, this was the worst feature of my old notebook, at least lately, when it would use 10% of the battery just recovering from standby (which admittedly could take a couple of minutes, another fun feature of its general brokenness). So I might be inflating the score by contrast.

But still, on my way to work today I installed the Express editions of Visual C#, C, JScript, and Web Developer, the trial versions of Flash and Dreamweaver, and VMWare Server. At the end of that, it was reporting over 5 hours left. That's not bad.

The big power drain is the screen. Run it at full brightness constantly and you'll only get 3½ hours or so. On the other hand, if you have it processing something and have the screen blanked most of the time, you'll get six hours easily.

Keyboard: Sucky (1/5)

This is the fly in the ointment, the wasp in the jam jar. The keyboard is crap. The feel is average; not great, not terrible. The layout, though, is terrible. The keyboard curves, "ergonomically", so none of the keys are quite where they should be. There is no space at all between the main part of the keyboard and the page up/down keys on the right; the inverted-T cursor keys have two useless keys attached to them [$ and €] so you can't easily use them by feel.

And due to the size of the notebook itself, the whole thing is positioned annoyingly far in, making it hard to type when I'm lying in bed. Which may not be a problem for most people, admittedly.

Bundled Utilities: Crap (0/5)

Not merely worthless, the bundled software actually detracts from the value of the machine. However, it is easily removed by installing a standard copy of Windows, something that's not exactly in short supply at Pixy Central.

Game Performance: Not tested, probably Sucky (1/5):

It's Intel Integrated Graphics, folks, and that means quality lousy gaming. I did manage to play Neverwinter Nights on my old notebook (also with the Intel 950 chipset), but when things got busy it ran like a slug.

Overall: Good (3/5)

Overall, it's a bit meh. It is a budget notebook, and it's fast and has a big disk drive, so it's not a bad meh, but it's not exciting. On the other hand, it does what I need (with the exception of that bloody keyboard), and it is a hell of a lot better than no notebook. It won't stop me buying another Acer notebook in the future, but I sure as hell won't buy it online.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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