We’ve mentioned that the weight is 2kg, but with most laptops you would have to add something for the power adaptor, 450g in this case. As the Timeline 4810T has the ability to run on battery all day, you don’t necessarily have to take the power brick on your travels so the 2kg figure is quite representative of the load you need to carry.
Battery Life Results
Battery life in Minutes
Longer bars are better
Mind you, the 5600mAh battery took a lengthy three hours and ten minutes to charge fully.
The exterior of the Timeline 4810T doesn’t give any clue how Acer has managed to stretch the battery life so far. The chassis is sleek, with dimensions that measure 336 x 241 x 27mm, and the battery doesn’t even stick out the back the way so many extended power packs do.
The clever stuff is inside the chassis and centres on the latest Intel components. The chipset is Intel's GS45 with a ICH9-M southbridge, and the processor in our sample is the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo. It sits on an 800MHz frontside bus and contains 3MB of L2 cache. The alternative processor is, as we said, a Core Solo U3500 but thanks to the wonders of Windows Vista Home Premium we can show you that Acer had also tried a 1.2GHz Core 2 Solo U3300 in the laptop at some point.
For some reason, Vista remembers the processors that have previously been installed so it appears that there are two processors installed simultaneously in the 4810T. In fact, the U3300 is a phantom device and the U9400 is for real.
The rest of the hardware consists of Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics, Intel's 5100 802.11n wireless card and 3GB of 1066MHz DDR 3 memory in two slots, although our test sample had 4GB installed.
COMMENTS
Linux
Looks like a very nice and reasonably priced bit of kit with an optical drive.
Being a Linux user on desktop, laptop and server I'd say it's likely that a little extra work might need to be done to get everything working, dependent on how standard the hardware is. For example a number of 802.11n wireless adapters are not natively supported within everyone's favourite fluffy distro, Umbongo. It can involve compiling and installing drivers from source supplied by the manufacturer or using an NDIS wrapper.
<M$-Sideswipe-Mode>
Having said that, even if a bit of tweaking is involved to get it all working with Umbongo, it will run like the proverbial hot poo off of a shovel compared to Fistula. And do you really want an OS that isn't sure which CPU is still plugged in? *titter*
</M$-Sideswipe-Mode>
*NIX?
*NIX-friendly or not?
"Then there’s the DVD drive eject button, which mirrors the position of the Power button - we found it was all too easy to press the wrong button when we wanted to turn on the laptop."
I for one would find the reverse quite a bit more annoying... but again, I'm part of these extremely gifted people able to remember the buttons' place after a couple hours using a piece of kit. ;-)
@Linux enquires..
Easy enough to try a CD/DVD version of Linux - get to see how well its works, and it doesn't affect the original OS.
Main complaint...
...is that is it doesn't embiggen your mental capacity to remember where buttons and ports are? How perfectly cromulent.
I Want It!
Seriously, if it were available here... Good build quality, a Core 2 Duo, 8 hours of battery life and only 2kg (together with an internal optical drive) on the 14" model, and, while not too cheap, it doesn't cost an arm and a leg?
