Acer TravelMate 8100!!! - Page 16

WoW and the 8104

WoW is currently my addiction du jour. How does it play on the 8104? Does the system become unbearably hot or fans become over loud after lenghty sessions of playing WoW?

Any ghosting or lag on the LCD in WoW?

Thanks

I was just told this just this morning via phone feb 28th at earliest...what a pisser they said I'm 3rd on the list and I don't think it means anything.

It's not getting hot at all. Runs very good. I run it in a window (1280x1024). The strange thing I noticed is that game became a little laggy. It's hard to describe. I would use term "smooth-jerky". Basically it's periodically almost freezes then smoothly accelerates to normal, almost freezes then smoothly accelerates to normal. It's subtle, not like total freeze. You might have seen similar effect when doing a corpse run in ghost mode. It's like WoW does not like fast hardware

No ghosting on LCD. In fact, FPS games are silky-smooth - I am extremely happy.

Would love to see SWG (Star Wars: Galaxies) on it with high settings. With all problems in that game, the views there are breathtaking But I stopped playing it in September and not going to resubscribe until they balance combat.

Anyone have any more links to companies that actually have the 8104's in stock? I really don't want to wait until Feb 28th with CDW (bummer).

I sorry, but does anyone have a 8103 and what is the actual bus speed is it 400mhz or 533mhz.
thanx

I am also wanting to buy the 8103, and I am pretty sure that its 400 mhz since intel 1.8 ghz doesn't support 533 mhz (check intel site). Aswell, acer/us has updated their specs with 400mhz so I'm pretty sure it will come with that.

The processor is probably a Pentium M 750. The real clock speed in 1.86 GHz, but Acer probably just rounded down for convienence. We know for sure that the 8104 is 533 MHz and I severely doubt that a company like acer lied about the equipment in the low end notebook.

There is great confusion on the 8103 specs. Trust nothing until someone actually sees one of these. I talked to Acer US Pre-sales (the people who _should_ know what's in this thing) on the phone this morning, and quote: "If our website says 400 MHz, that's probably right." Probably?

So I guess it is confirmed that the size of the 400FSB and their new 533FSB is the same size because of the two models?

http://us.acer.com/acerpanam/page9.d...crc=3160585103

The 8103 model is an 400FSB version while the 8104 is the 533FSB version?!?!?!?!?!

Received my 8104WLMI yesterday and it's going back for depot service today.

Here's a summary of what happened in order to prevent problems for others that may have the same idea as me.

The first thing I noticed, after the pretty nice looks, good ergonomics, and good build quality, was the way they partitioned the hard drive... stupid! So, I installed a copy of partition magic (8.0) and immediately wiped out the D drive and resized the C drive to use all the available space. When I rebooted, everything seemed to be very sluggish and I could tell something was not right. OK, I'll just use the Recovery CD's and start from scratch.

Follow the instructions that came with the Recovery CD's and ran through the recovery process. Didn't take more than 15 minutes and it was pretty much done.

When it rebooted, I rec'd an error message that simply stated "eRecovery Error". Nothing more.

Everything else seemed to be working properly. OK, something didn't work right so I'll run through the recovery process one more time. Another 20 minutes later, same problem on reboot.

This morning I called Acer support and they are basically clueless because the system is so new. It appears that there is an eRecovery program that is installed from the factory that may be saving recovery files on the D partition and when I wiped it out, eRecovery can't work properly. Interestingly, when you do a full recovery, it doesn't re-establish the default partitions. (The only other one I'm familiar with is Thinkpad's and theirs does!) So once I wiped out the partiition, eRecovery is generating an error because it can't load.

The tech suggested that I leave a 1 gig partition for the D drive instead of completely removing it. Not sure if I understand this and I'm not sure the tech did either.

At any rate, they are picking the laptop up tomorrow and going to restore factory settings. (I thought that's what the Recovery CD's should do?) At this point, according to him, they don't know what else to do. Seems like a flaky response.

The tech was very nice and kept putting me on hold because he knows nothing about the system. He said they don't even have one to refer to.

What little I did get to use the system, I have a few comments that may be beneficial to others...

Screen - I really like ACER 15.4" WSXGA+ screen. Others may like the "brite" type screens, but for me (business, not gaming), I really like the wide aspect, brightness, and clarity. I currently have a T42 Thinkpad with the 14.1" screen and I liked the ACER better.

Keyboard - There is some flex in the center despite what others may say. If you want to see what "no flex", try a Thinkpad. It's not bothersome, it's just there. The keyboard, for a touch typist such as myself, will take some getting used to. It's not as comforatable or responsive as the Thinkpad, but it's not bad.

Connections - I don't care for all the connections (AC, Network Cable, USB's etc) being on the side of the laptop. By the time you are finished plugging in a few things, you've got wires on both sides and in the way of any papers you might want to set next to it.

Wireless - Seems very strong. Maybe the new higain antenna they have in it but it seems much stronger than the one in my Thinkpad.

Touchpad - Better than most of the ones that I've used. I generally use a trackpoint with the Thinkpad because I don't like the touchpads. Dell's really suck, but ACER's is more than a cut above Dell's. It's top notch as far as I'm concerned and I think I could easily get used to it. Everything is enables also... double-touch, scrolling, etc. Quality buttons and surface! It also gets warm, not hot. It's the only part of the laptop that gets warm except for the air vent on the left side near the back.

Fan noise - The fan is loud enough that you hear it running (I can not hear my Thinkpad's ever and I have excellent hearing). It seems to come on almost immediately after the laptop boots. Not annoying, just running. And it does blow warm air out the vent.

Size - Love it, love it, love it. It's the thin and light 15.4" laptop I've been looking for. I really like the looks and new folio design. Very, very attractive.

Build Quality - Seems to be very well put together. Definitely better than Dell but not quite up to Thinkpad standards. The bottom is very clean and properly labeled and all the connectivity options are easy to identify.

Summary - Pictures as soon as I get it back, but I'm going to try and use this laptop for some serious work and see how it hold up. Faster than my 1.8 mhz. Thinkpad. Both booting and shutting down are pretty quick. I'm looking at this from a purely business point of view and I think they've got a very good laptop that will compete very well with Thinkpads, Dells, and HP. The new slimmer design will really appeal to those who want a wide aspect that IBM does not offer.

I still want to test out the ezDock as soon as they become available.

One other neat thing is they have a DVI port on the back so if you want to hook it up to your DVI enabled widescreen TV, you can do it.

More info and comments when I get a chance to use it for a while. For now, I'll see how long it takes to turn it around when it has to go in for service.

Instead of using the recovery disc, shouldn't you also have the OEM windows disc? If you do or if you do not borrow one from a friend and try this

1) Pop in the OEM window disc and when you get to the partition screen, remove both the partition and have the system format your drive. Once it start to install, reboot your computer right away
2) Once system reboot, repartition the drive again into two drives (it is actually 3 drives from my understanding because one of it is a hidden drive).

Then use the recovery CD, if not just use the OEM Window and work from there?

Sounds to me like you should have left things the way they were. You could have used fdisk just to view it and then partitioned it that way.

sorry to hear about your problems, i guess it could have been avoided by installing another copy of windows if you have one available.

this sounds like almost perfect laptop to me, thx for your input

Of the 3 sites CDW.COM, PCMALL.COM, and PCCONNECTION.COM

I have to say the useability of PCCONNECTION.COM layout is far greater than the other two. Freaken the layout sucks!

There is a hidden ~3GB partition (I mentioned all the partitions and sizes somwhere at the beginning of the thread) that has system you can restore from. There is an option in BIOS to perform Disk-to-disk retore. No need for CDs. After many attempts to backup partitions properly (and to restore on other physical disk) using Ghost and TrueImage, I turned to PartitionMagic too. Neither Ghost nor TrueImage could do it properly. PartitionMagic did the trick and I had zero problems ever since.

The problem with restoring just OS: although there are two CDs that are used to restore just an OS (they are labeled accordingly), I'm not sure you have all the drivers and applications there. Trying to find them elsewhere? If you look into C:\WINDOWS directory, you'll see subdirectories like LAN, WLAN, VGA.... Those are directories with drivers for subsystems. Having deep knowledge of computers and laptops in particular, I was able to find even more: things like installs for eManager, ePowerManager. I also downloaded HD Audio driver from Realtek site, etc. Given a bit more time I will combine that with C:\i386 and some other files to build bootable Win XP Pro disk that will be used to install OS + drivers + basic applications from scratch. It's much harder than with TM8003 though.

I bought from shopblt.com, excellent site, got my computer like they said and fast. They were prolly the first to have them available too.

Yes, that probably would have been a good solution, but by the time I realized things went astray, it was too late. I've done this many times using Partition Magic and never had problems before. At this point, I feel comfortable sending it in because they said they would check it out for me.

You can't use FDISK in windows, in fact, FDISK is not even found in the Windows folder with XP. You to create a boot floppy disk in order to change the partitions with FDISK. Didn't have a USB floppy at the time and I'm not sure the USB floppy would even work with this approach (boot to dos using bootable floppy but how do you get USB support in DOS????).

Hope you read this soon man,
http://www.shopblt.com/cgi-bin/shop/...R_ID=952241061
claim to have one in stock in sothern califoernia. Obviously call and make sure its no bs like cdw. Good luck

DarthAcer

Yes, I saw another partition that showed up in Partition Magic, but I figured this was for the eRecovery system. The installs for the Utilities that ACER provides are on the System CD. If you boot it, it start the recovery process; however, if your system is running and you put it in the drive and let it start up, you get the installs for the utilities ... including eManager that contains the eRecovery program. The tech had me re-install it thinking that it might setup the recovery area all over again, but no luck. Still got the same error on re-boot.

I think the solution might have been to install the OS without any addons and then install them later. I should have done that because I have a number of unused copies of Win XPP.

My approach will be different when I get it back.

Are you able to get into the eRecovery option... click the eManager on the desktop and then select eRecovery?

One neat option is how you can change the boot order without going into the bios using eManager. Also, I don't remember seeing the recovery process in the bios? I was in there at least 3-4 times. What screen was that on?