Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T

As I wrote in a previous post I recently replaced my Lenovo T43p with a new Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T. This laptop is arguably the most impressive piece of technology I've purchased in the last 12 months.

In all honesty, my T43's demise was not a "surprise" event. I knew it was reaching an end-of-life event because the battery was getting weaker and the onboard fan kept getting noisier and noisier. I spent almost 10 months researching a replacement. I had2 major requirements for my replacement laptop. First, it had to be light. My T43 had been 4.5 pounds but with power supply and accessories my bag always felt closer to 8 or 9 pounds. Second, try as I might (I even added the super-extendo 9-cell battery) I could never get more than 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life. This of course meant I had to carry my power supply, which of course made my bag heavier.

First, my 3810T is light. It weighs in at 3.25 pounds. Second, the battery lasts for 8+ hours. I've taken the laptop out for an entire workday and brought it home with 2 hours of battery life still showing. And I paid extra to get the model with the Intel Core 2 Duo processor, so this laptop is no slouch. It gets up and boogies when the workload requires. Now let's be clear, this is not a gaming machine. Nor is it a video editing monster. But if you're looking for a good stable, lightweight, long battery life laptop this just may be your next laptop.

Aside from a few very minor issues I'm giving my this laptop 5 full stars. On the plus side it has a Core 2 Duo CPU, a 500 GB hard drive, and 4 GB of RAM. On the minus side, the keys on the mouse are a tiny bit hard to press. But not so much as to be really annoying. And the laptop itself does have a very well made feel to it. All in all I'd say it would be a good choice for most business users.

I'll blog again after a few months to let you all know how we get on. :-)

Welcome to 2010 ...

I took the plunge ...

After 5 glorious years and many miles and smiles (and some frowns too), my good old friend Mr. Lenovo T43p laptop finally started throwing serious errors a couple weeks back. So I was forced to replace my old friend with a new Acer Aspire Timeline 3810T.

This laptop of course came with Windows 7 64-bit. Yes, OK, it came with Home Premium and I Anytime Upgraded to Ultimate. Still ... I've done it. I took the plunge. Here I am running Windows 7 as my primary OS on my main system. And you know what? It wasn't all that big of a deal. To date I've only found 2 programs that won't run under Windows 7. My IPSec VPN software (Netgear's ProSafe VPN Client) and my SSL-VPN client (from Netgear's FVS336G).

But even that wasn't such a big deal. I found 2 replacements for my IPSec VPN; Shrew Software VPN (open source) and TheGreenBow VPN (traditional). The SSL-VPN issue was averted by implementing my SonicWALL SSL-VPN 200 appliance which is Windows 7 64-bit and IE 8 compatible. But just to be safe I still installed XP Mode under Windows 7 Ultimate. And once installed I installed & implemented the failed Netgear VPN's, which now run fine in their native XP environment.

Out of all the features of Windows 7 (and there are many), XP Compatibility Mode is arguably the best. It allows you to install applications that just can't or won't run under Windows 7 in the familiar XP Pro environment. XP Mode runs a streamlined copy of XP Professional under Windows 7 inside a streamlined version of Virtual PC. And it's not totally without it's own unique issues (like software licensing). But in total it's been a fairly painless operation. Much less painful than trying to recover necessary files from a totally dead laptop. :-)

Welcome to 2010 ...