Acer Timeline X 4820TG
12-hour battery life – oh, really?
Review A year ago Acer’s Aspire Timeline 4810T notched up a ground-breaking eight hours of battery life thanks to the careful use of low power Core 2 hardware. The new Acer Aspire Timeline X ups the ante with claims that it can deliver up to 12 hours from the optional nine-cell battery – the standard six-cell is another story.
Ever ready? Acer's Timeline X
The Timeline X is available in the same three sizes of chassis as the original Timeline, 13.3, 14 and 15.6in and, in each case, the LED back-lit screen has a resolution of 1366 x 768 that supports 720 HD video.
Among the first batch of Timeline X models to arrive in the UK is Acer’s 4820TG rather than the 4820T. While the Timeline X 4820T puts the emphasis on long battery life – having a Core i3-330M dual core CPU, 3GB RAM, a 250GB HDD and Intel graphics along with a price of £600 – the 4820TG aims for performance, presumably to the detriment of battery life.
The list of differences is considerable with the 4820TG review sample sporting a dual core, 2.27GHz Intel Core i5-430M CPU with an Intel HM55 chipset, 4GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory in two modules, a 320GB 5400rpm Sata hard drive and an ATi Mobility Radeon HD 5650 GPU with 1GB of memory.
There are a couple of oddities in the rest of the specification as both the Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n wireless are provided by Atheros where the inclusion of Intel wireless would allow Acer to smother the thing in Centrino stickers.
CPU configurations vary, and with them the actual battery life
The other is the multi-format, tray-loading DVD writer doesn’t have an eject button so you have to perform the task using software controls, either in Windows Explorer, the Acer Arcade Deluxe DVD player application or some other application that you choose to instal.
COMMENTS
You can put the live CD in before you shut down
It's not like you have to stand by the PC waiting for post and then open, put in the cd and then shut it again.
I normally just burn a distro (or more recently make a bootable USB stick), leave the disk in the drive and hit reboot.
Linux
Can't pop in a LiveCD if the DVD drive has no external eject button...
(I say use a paper clip to trigger the drive tray release and stuff it in that way, but who wants to carry a paper clip around???)
Correction. CPU not Quad Core
The i5-430 is not a Quad Core as stated in the review. It is a Dual Core but it does have hyperthreading which makes it show 4 processing units to the OS and gives it better threading performance than a dual core.
No Eject Button on DVD Drive?
So when the HDD is borked, how do you open the tray to boot the system from an OS install disk?
Its a shame...
...that you cannot test both the headline model (the 4820T) and the nicer spec'd (4820TG) high end version. IF 12 hours battery were achievable it would be interesting to see the graphs (and performance droop) as it is we only see graphs for what you have and the 'false' marketing claims leave a taint on this model, which is a shame as it looks quite good.
