Acer Travelmate 8003LMi review - Page 3

If the design is anything like the 800 design internally, then the CPU should be fairly upgradable.. about easily.. depends, IMO it's not hard to disassemble the laptop case, but it's not _that_ easy to get to the cpu either.

Well I received mine late on Friday and it has a very weird artifact on the screen, obviously a hardware problem. It's not dead pixels exactly, it's something that I have never seen before. It's a blinking vertical line that appears in either red, yellow or green, and only when the underlying image containts certain colors. Very strange, and very frustrating. Fortunately Adam at PC Torque already got in touch with me and it looks like all will be well next week.

Aside from that, it's inmediately evident that returning the AOpen 1557 and getting this was the best decision I could make. The 8003LMi leaves the AOpen in the dust in every respect.
It's much sturdier than my old Travelmate, it feels very, very solid without a single creak or squeak. They also made the underside of the notebook smoother, with less protruding pieces. Buttons and keyboard also feel better.
The screen... well the screen is a complex one. I like it better: it's brighter and has far less ghosting than the old screen, but it does have a very limited viewing angle. The screen has to be at a very specific angle to look correctly. Still, looks great to me.
Everything else has worked great so far: WLAN, Bluetooth, etc... too bad it came with a defective screen or videocard or whatever the cause of this is, and I will have to wait some more...
The Radeon 9700 is the "low end" kind, it comes clocked to the lowest speed I have seen: 390/205. Somehow it sill manages to be noticeably faster than the AOpen's 9600, even though the AOpen's CPU was 1.7 instead of the Acer's 1.6... I did see some strange hiccups but I can't say whether these were related to the aforementioned glitch or not. In light of the video problems I didn't attempt loading Omegas or overclocking at all.
Battery life seems to be incredible. I benchmarked, played games and copied files over the wireless network for 2 hours and I still had about 30% left, which is very good, and means I could easily get over 4 hours normal use.

On final bit of prelimnary info I would like to share is that I still have no idea where the second RAM module is. Much like the Acer Ferrari, they say both modules can be upgraded, but I can only see one, reachable through a hatch at the bottom of the laptop. Instructions don't say anything about changing the second module. I will call Acer on Monday and find out.
Once I have a replacement I will post a detailed review.

Sounds good, can you tell us how are the speakers? Also 2nd opinion on how warm does it get on the palm rest when typing or gaming

FYI, it's not a low end settings for GPU, higher then my compal c56 at least which was set to 390/202

What about the contrast and backlight?
Do you see something like this on your screen?
http://notebookforums.com/showpost.p...7&postcount=26

well I am just curious if it's possible to upgrade to Dothan later on

Komugi - Do you know if the gpu may be possible to upgrade on the 800 design?

Klas: Speakers are just as good as the Travelmate 800's, which is to say, worlds better than the AOpen's. Sound is fairly full and loud, not a tweety toy-speaker like the 1557's. Definitely not up there with those nice JBL systems with subwofer, but you can actually listen to music while you work on these, and not be tortured.

Grishnak: Yes, I definitely see that. The viewing angle is definitely not the best, but I think I prefer that to the older display which produced way to much ghosting for me.
But you're right though, there's definitely a backlight/viewing angle issue with this screen. This is one area where the AOpen had the upper hand, the display was better than this I think.

Maker Brand...?

Hi, McDanger!

As i could know, it seems Acer don't make some of its Laptops, such as TM 290 Serie [Compal].
Could you please tell the maker brand of your TM 8003 Laptop?
Try looking at Bios.
Try looking underneath the laptop too, there where you can read maker data, can you read some such as "Mod.:CLxx"...?

Maybe some other person with a TM 8k Serie who knows for sure could help me!
I do really want to know before buying.

What about build quality?

Thanks a lot for the review and regards!

I wonder if the screen on the 15.4 inch 2025 is similar...

15'' and Wide Screen 15.4'' are very differents. For example, 15.4'' screens have much better viewing angles. Problem is that Acer only supplies WXGA screens, a little bit low resolution at least for me...

Regards!

My Acer F3000 is based on the same chasis like the TM80x/TM800x and is manufactured by Wistron.

Dear McDanger,

Will appreciate very much if you could give me an indication about the kind of material used for the casing of your 8003 (Is it plastic or metal?). Acer advertises aluminum casing only for Travelmate 800 series and says nothing about the casing for 8000 series. Personally I hate when the notebook is made completely of plastic. I was quite enthusiastic about the specs of 8000 series until I realized that I cannot find any indication about the type of material used for the casing.

Thanks a lot.

The 8000 series is plastic. All be it the toughest plastic i have seen on any laptop.....

I don't mean this in a condescending grammar police type way, but I was really amused at your brain slip when you wrote out albeit. THen I got to thinking, hmm, perhaps they spell it out in the UK. Which lead me to this interesting link:

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/inde...?date=20001107

Interestingly enough, it's actually a shortened form of "although it be"!

Again, don't mean this in a grammar police type way--just thought you'd find this interesting too.

Lol.....

I dunno u knew what i meant

Hey, I'm new on this forum, but I have to say that I have found some interesting stuff here.

I'm probably going to buy an Acer TM 800x but as I live in Belgium, I still have to wait a bit until the Dothan proc arrives.

I was wondering, can anybody tell me what the response time of the screen is on these notebooks? And do any of you have problems with ghosting while gaming?

Thx a lot

No ghosting here during game playing on the 8006lmi.

Not sure what the TFT respsonse times are but it is a LG TFT which means it is <= 25ms which is standard for all laptop screens really.

Dothan should be available now in belgium the european release of the 8006 anyway was 10 days ago UK stores have them in stock.

Thx Dekka, now I'm totally convinced to get me one of those!

Btw, what's the price of an 8006lmi at the moment, I can't get no info at all from Acer Belgium, I send them mails quite often and half of the time they respond with something like
"We don't know anyting about that, seems you're better informed than we are!"

UK price from www.acernotebooks.co.uk today is £1645.00 inc VAT which is 2469 euros.

fragile case

I have recently bought the 8003, and I find the cover alittle too fragile.

What disturbs me is the way that the cover flexes easily under pressure, compromising the integrity of the LCD on the other side. If you press on the cover lightly while looking at the screen on the other side, you'll see the screen discolor where it is pressed.

I tried the same experiment on my old HP notebook, and my sister's new Fujitsu notebook, with approx the same pressure, the two notebooks do not show any discoloration at all (the covers hardly flexed).

This makes the 8003 a fragile model to carry around in my bag. I'll have to be careful to not put too much pressure on the cover in case I damage the screen. People who intend to travel often with this notebook should consider this before choosing this model.