As1712smi HELP! What does 64bt future hold?
Hi, greg here.
(First, Adam, thanks for the great pictures)
Has any one called taiwan on any of these Acer as1712smi isues?
I called Taiwan because no one at Texas Tech (Acer's service depo in Texas) could answer any questions about the monitor.
I was told by an engineer in Taiwan that the screen had 250 nits of brightness, 350:1 contrast ratio, and a responce rate if 25 miliseconds.
I'm told most good laptops currently have a contrast ratio of 250:1.
I also asked him how long this 1700 chassis has been/will be on the marked. He said it has been on the market in europe for nearly a year, and that these things go for about three years, so that it should be around at least another two years. I asked him that, if during, and again, towards the end of the run, there is a chipset change, if I could purchase the latest motherbourd and upgrade the note book. He said, short of Intel turning the chip back on it's side ala Pentium slot 1 and 2 (II and III) he saw no problem, acept the cost. I had been told earlier in the day by Texas Tech that a mother board replacement would cost $100 US dollars. Today, I was told by someone else at Texas Tech it cost $300 US dollers.
The engineer also told me that the NvidiaFX GO 5700 had 128mg dedicated ram onboard, as oppossed to being told by Texas Tech that it was shared with the 1 gig of ram on the mother board.
I forgot to ask how many fans the unit had.
Next time I call taiwan, I make a list!
One Texas Tech told me there were no openings on the bottom of the unit, and that the one fan on the cpu drew air from the left side vent and blew out the right side vent. From Adam's pictues, it seems it draws air from the right rear vent, and turns it and blows it out the right side vent. But there are plenty of openings on the bottom, and that video card has a fan as well, a huge relief for me, for it seems you could fry eggs on the HP zd7000's keyboard, and that has two fans as well.
I spoke to a another Texas Tech rep, and he could not find any info on the fan(s), so he checked his parts price manual. He said there was no fans listed. I jokingly said, ok, so there must not be any fan!
At this point I decided maybe when my unit goes south, I'd be better off sending it to Canada's tech depo, but considering acer is dumping all the earlier generation 1700 units there, I don't know what to make of that?
I did not like the walk in service options in new york city, one store looked like it had been bomed in both the sales and service dept, and the salesman claimed for two and a half weeks that he would be getting a 1712 in the next day, day after day, and I put up with it, till I made a trip out of nyc to a store way out on long island where I knew for a fact one existed. Loved it. As for the sales dept of the second nyc store, they seemed like they could care less about the 1712, and refused to order one for me. When I tried to compare the Sonys and Fujitsus to the acers they did have, using my store bought DVDs, thee sales and management said no, because all these units had removable optical drives, which were removed for theft protection and they refused to put any optical drives back in for a short 'spin'. Too bad, they had a tidy store and a nice looking tech area, at least from the looks of the waiting room. But if that is how they treat you when you try to buy from them, how will they treat you when you come in to get a unit you didn't purchase from them repaired?
The real scary part happend last week when I double checked my service area by area code in the Acer service and support search engine, and the Comp Usa nearby popped up. I was elated. But when I called that particular Comp Usa store the next morning, they claimed to know nothing about the fact that they were supposed to be an authorized Acer service center. Acer claimed it was a corporate level agreement that hadn't filtered down to the service centers yet, and that Comp Usa keeps a data base of manuals, and that the Acer manuals will be fed into Comp Usa's data base so the techs will have access to them. The techs at Comp Usa disputed that, said that they had no data base of manuals (??) and said they are given hands on training on any given product they service, so if they were to service Acer, they would know it. Today I put three calls into Comp Usa, and climbed up the superviser ladder, and each time I was told the next conection was to the corperate level, I was disconected.
Isn't life grand when you sweat the small stuff?
I was concerned with all this talk of bios changing, and that it might be a warranty voiding issue, but I was told by an Acer tech that they would walk anyone through, and that it is no big deal. Good. Maybe I will finaly by the damn thing now.
Has the new bios cleared up the USB boot situation?
BTW, a second tech I spoke to today told me this new bios was not available online yet. I give up!
Also, I was told that the screen was made by a company called QDI, but I don't have the model number under my nose. Someone else at another forum said that it was made by aoctech or some such, but a Google cut and paste brought no results. I wanted to know if I would have the option of changing blown florecients, but Acer said that they only deal with screens no longer than three years, and remove the whole unit as a module, and that the current off warranty replacement cost is of said module is $700. Also today, I asked an Acer Texas Tech what will happen now that Intel canned the pentium 5, etc, and if they would be offering any units with AMD's 64bt cpu. Nobody knew. No surprise. I guess I will call taiwan again soon. What the Taiwan engineer told me the other night, was that Intel was having problems, and that there would be no new chips till at least fall, that there won't be many 64 bit programs for some time, and that the 3.02 hyper threader with the 800 megahertz acts as duel 32 bt processors anyway,(albiet slowly) and that all the 64bt programs will be reverse compatible with 32 bt processors anyway.
Lastly, is there any real benefit to getting XP Pro over XP Home? I'm not even a gamer(GASP!) but I do look at a lot of graphics. What are the pros and cons of both?
It may not matter regardless, I need to purchase this unit as soon as possible, and all the local sources I trust say they can only locate them in XP Pro versions.
Lastly, I don't know what to make of this, but someone on another forum said that Nvidia did not support the FX Go5700 card directly, that Acer did not post the recent drivers for the video card either, and that he recomended going to the website of another manufacurer that utilizes these cards and to use the updated drivers that were posted at those suport sites. Isn't that a bit off color? I mean, wouldn't those drivers be specific to the specifications of those manufacturer's machines, and wouldn't that be tossing a monkey wrench into the works? And why the heck wouldn't Nvidia support their products in the first place?
Oh, and last night, on the US site, there was a 5th AS1711sci being offered, one with a Nvidia Fx Go 5700 with 64 megs supported ram instead of the onboard Intel video processor. Hmmmm, seems like one corporate body that acts as a living entity finaly got it's bowels moving.
