A Quick review of my Acer 8204
The screen:
As people say, it’s not a top quality screen. It’s not as sharp as the one on my other laptop (Z-note 4100 SXGA), but the contrast and colours are better. I wouldn’t recommend it to people working e.g. web graphics, but then again I would never recommend a flat screen for this.
It however doesn’t have any grey lines or light leakage as other people are having problems with.
GPU:
I can’t hear any buzzing noise. In Oblivion or the Tokamak demos the only sound is the fan spinning. It is not a silent laptop when running e.g. Oblivion but that’s to be expected with the x1600, and if you use for taking notes in school the laptop doesn’t make a sound. My 3DMark05 score is 4350 with should be more than enough for running the games on the marked today.
Keyboard:
If you never used this kind of keyboard it will take some time getting use to it. Some of the keys are places rather odd (Like the “\<>”), at least in comparison to my other laptop, but the quality of the keyboard is great.
Core Duo:
What can I say: Wau!
Software:
In my experience, the Acer software is buggy. I have made a clean install with nothing but the drivers, and it runs much faster. I haven’t had a single crash since the reinstall and all the hardware function perfectly.
I have installed the Omega drivers and the realtek drivers from their own homepage. No problem there. The only problem is the Logitech drivers. Gcc will not compile unless you disable the drivers. I had some similar problems with this on my old laptop, so the laptop it selves is not the problem here.
A quick fix is to create a bat file that disable and afterwards enable the driver when developing programs.
Here is my specs and setup:
Acer 8204 build 602 with the Samsung screen.
Bios: 3312
Clean Windows XP SP2
No Acer software!
Omega 6.3 Graphics Driver
Newest Realtek HD Audio Driver
Windows Power Meter - 3+ hours on battery
All other drivers are from the acer-euro.com website.
The screen:
As people say, it’s not a top quality screen. It’s not as sharp as the one on my other laptop (Z-note 4100 SXGA), but the contrast and colours are better. I wouldn’t recommend it to people working e.g. web graphics, but then again I would never recommend a flat screen for this.
It however doesn’t have any grey lines or light leakage as other people are having problems with.
GPU:
I can’t hear any buzzing noise. In Oblivion or the Tokamak demos the only sound is the fan spinning. It is not a silent laptop when running e.g. Oblivion but that’s to be expected with the x1600, and if you use for taking notes in school the laptop doesn’t make a sound. My 3DMark05 score is 4350 with should be more than enough for running the games on the marked today.
Keyboard:
If you never used this kind of keyboard it will take some time getting use to it. Some of the keys are places rather odd (Like the “\<>”), at least in comparison to my other laptop, but the quality of the keyboard is great.
Core Duo:
What can I say: Wau!
Software:
In my experience, the Acer software is buggy. I have made a clean install with nothing but the drivers, and it runs much faster. I haven’t had a single crash since the reinstall and all the hardware function perfectly.
I have installed the Omega drivers and the realtek drivers from their own homepage. No problem there. The only problem is the Logitech drivers. Gcc will not compile unless you disable the drivers. I had some similar problems with this on my old laptop, so the laptop it selves is not the problem here.
A quick fix is to create a bat file that disable and afterwards enable the driver when developing programs.
Here is my specs and setup:
Acer 8204 build 602 with the Samsung screen.
Bios: 3312
Clean Windows XP SP2
No Acer software!
Omega 6.3 Graphics Driver
Newest Realtek HD Audio Driver
Windows Power Meter - 3+ hours on battery
All other drivers are from the acer-euro.com website.
