I'm in love
Written: Aug 06 '03 (Updated Sep 22 '03)
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Pros: Long battery life, runs cool, and light weight.
Cons: Weak speakers.
The Bottom Line: If you travel and this computer is just for the road, buy it. If you want to throw away that desktop system or play first-person shooters, maybe not.
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| TJLeeland's Full Review: Acer TravelMate 800XCi (LX.T2506.057) PC Notebook |
My wife asked me if I love my new Acer TravelMate 800XCi more than her. I don't, it's not even close - but I really do love it.
For me there were two major issues concerning buying a laptop: weight and battery life. Price was going to be a factor too until I bought and returned two sub-$1000 laptops. What a mistake they were. I first bought a Dell Inspiron 1100 (junk - the touchpad was warped and its seven pounds was just too much to carry around) and a then a "no-name" Averatec (formerly Sotec - it had a cramped keyboard with a tiny and poorly placed backspace key, and too small a screen for the 1024 x 786 res) and hated them both. The Averatec even more. Maybe I should do a review on the Averatec so no one makes the mistake of buying it.
I ended up getting a good deal on the Acer by buying a $1100 refurbished unit (found through epinions, of course) with an additional third party 3 year warranty to compensate for and mitigate the risk. I saved literally $500 doing it this way. The computer and warranty were less than $1250, whereas the lowest priced new unit was $1750.
Please understand that in no way was I looking for a replacement for my desktop or for a gaming computer. This is for the road and in the air, to check email; write documents; study; and play games no more demanding than You Don't Know Jack. So my major concerns were with its weight and battery life. If that's not the kind of computer you're looking for this review isn't going to be very helpful (but that doesn't mean you should rate it as such!)
Another issue somewhat unique to me was Linux. I needed to be able to dual-boot my laptop with Windows XP Pro and Linux. Currently the only thing not running under Red Hat Linux 9.0 is the wireless networking, and from what I can find there is no Linux driver for it at all. But since the standard (wired) networking card DOES work it's not that big a deal. So if you need Linux on your laptop, you know where you stand with this one.
It came with:
1.3GHz Pentium M
256 MB RAM
30 GB HD
32 MB Radeon Video Card (WOW!)
8x DVD/ 24x CDR Drive
14.1" TFT Active Matrix Screen
4x USB 2.0 Ports
Firewire Port
802.11b Wireless NIC
Intel 10/100 NIC
56k Modem
Windows XP Pro
To my surprise the Acer TravelMate 800XCi has built-in smart card authentication. This means you can require that users logging in not only need a username and password, but also need to slide a smart card into a slot. Two of these cards come with the computer. This is a great feature if you want to be able to give someone, like your kids your password but still be able to take away their access when you're not around (or when you ground them).
It also included a PCMCIA 4 in 1 memory card reader and a combo DVD reader/24x CDRW. The latter is what I expect these days now that the price of these drives have come down so much in price. Most travelers I know want a DVD for the plane, but don't want to give up a CDRW either.
The laptop has a nice look to it; silver and dark grey plastic. Not flashy like the original iBook, but not cheap looking like the new ones either. I've only had it for a month, but so far it doesn't have any dings or scratches. The 14.1" screen isn't big by most standards but for a laptop around five pounds it's pretty good; it's crisp and clear, and easy to read at a resolution of 1024 x 768. You can see the screen just fine from an angle, which is nice it you have two people watching a DVD.
The keyboard is big enough that my large sized hands can type without fat-fingering the keys. It has the all-important Windows key (I just don't understand why companies like IBM make a laptop without the Windows key. I use [Win]-E all the time to open explorer and it drives me nuts when I can't do it because the company is still back in 1994) and has all the others you'd expect on a laptop. In the upper right corner you'll find four small buttons: One starts IE, the other Outlook Express (both can be changed to something like Netscape or Eudora easily) and two are user-defined. Backspace, Enter, Shift, Caps Lock, and Tab are all full sized keys and everything's where you'd expect them to be.
The laptop weighs in at about five pounds. That's about as much as I'm willing to carry these days and finding a full-sized laptop at that weight wasn't easy unless money wasn't a factor.
Sorry for the following messy paragraph: You want a The Pentium-M (P-M) CPU. Not a Pentium-III-M (P3-M) or Pentium-4-M (P4-M). The Pentium-M is the first Intel chip designed from the ground up to be a mobile chip. Intel claims that a Pentium-M will run faster at the same clock speed than the P4-M. In other words a Pentium-M running at 1.5 GHz will be faster than its P4-M brother at 1.5 GHz. In fact, a Pentium-M running at 1.5 GHz is supposed to be as fast as a P4-M 2.0 GHz. So my little 1.3 GHz laptop is really like having a 1.8 GHz P4. This is confusing to a lot of people used to using megahertz to define performance. For now, when buying a laptop and looking at a Pentium-M add 500 MHz to its speed to compare it to a Pentium-4-M. Stay away from the P3-M altogether. It's old technology and you're better off buying a P-M anyhow. (sorry if that was hard to get through)
Intel claims the Pentium-M not only runs faster, it runs cooler and has much better battery management – giving up to 4-5 hours of battery life. I have found this to be very true. This is the coolest running laptop I've used since my old 486. Even the Pentium 133 MHz Compaq Armada ran hotter than this one, even after hours of use.
The battery life truly lives up to the claim. I grabbed the laptop one day and started using it with the battery charge at 91%. It took four and a half hours before I finally had to plug it in. 4 1/2 hours! So then I thought, maybe it's the kind of work I was doing. So the next day I charged it back up to 92% (I was shooting for 91% to make it a fair comparison) and played a two and half hour DVD with the screen backlight almost all the way up and the sound at its max. After the movie finished I still had nearly 40% of my battery left! I put in another DVD and got a total of three and a half hours out of one battery charged at just 92%! I was impressed.
The video card is a Radeon 9000. It was one of the best video cards I'd seen in the under $2000 crowd. The video card's RAM isn't shared with the system RAM like with many laptops these days. You can actually play 3D games at a decent enough frame rate. The screen is the real issue here. Pipe the output to a real monitor and add a USB trackball, and you can actually play Unreal Tournament 2003! Now that's incredible. Of course you wouldn't want to go up against someone on a P4 3.06 GHz desktop with 1 GB RAM and a 128 MB AGP Radeon 9600, but if you're playing alone, against bots it'll do nicely.
One of the downsides to the computer is that the speakers are too quiet for listening to movies or other such audio. I have to plug in powered speakers which you just can't do on an airplane. I just bought a $20 set of MicroLab USB portable speakers which I hope will help me overcome this problem. This is the only real issue I have with this laptop. **UPDATE** I bought the speakers and it took care of the problem. The MicroLab speakers plug into the Speaker Out jack, but get their power from the USB port. So I can listen to DVDs with no problem, and they're small enough that they easily fit in my bag.
I bought the Acer as a Centrino so it came with 802.11b. That's my fault. I could have gotten an 802.11g card if I'd wanted, and I still could get one for the PCMCIA slot or USB.
Speaking of which, a really neat feature is the button in the front that allows you to turn off the wireless LAN. Sometimes wireless network cards will find a network while you're out-and-about and keep popping up discovery messages. This button turns off the wireless LAN completely. Another button turns off the wired LAN card which is also nice so that your computer doesn't get confused as to which network interface to use if you're plugged into both, which can really slow down network communication. This beats the alternative of going into the network control panel and disabling network interfaces. Good thinking on the part of Acer, and since both buttons default to "on" when you reboot you don't have to worry about troubleshooting network problems caused by you forgetting you turned the card off.
So that's it. This computer will be second on my all-time list of favorite laptops, with the old 133 MHz Pentium I Compaq Armada as the only laptop that beats it. If the Acer had a trackball and battery/handle (the Armada's battery wasn't inserted into the laptop itself, but instead went into a long handle that ran the full length along the back. You could carry the Armada by this handle and know you weren't going to drop it. It also functioned as a rear stand to prop up the back and tilt the front of the laptop down) like the Armada it might be too close to call.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1250
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
TJLeeland
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Member: TJ Leeland
Location: San Francisco, CA
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 0 members
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