Acer TravelMate 8100!!! - Page 48

I am SOOOOOOOOOOOO sorry to hear that! BUMMER!! Do you know of ANY company anywhere else in the world that actually has them in now, AND ships to the US??

There are lots that claim they have them, but i know for a fact we were the first company to get any back orders on for them, and we got the first two batches.

Can you believe lots of other companies did not think this machine was value for money!!!

Belinda7:

I think your best bet is to place an order with PC Connection. They show "3-5 days" as stock status, and when I spoke to a customer service rep on Friday, she said that they were due in today. I will let you know when I receive my shipping confirmation.

Michael

Belinda and all else: Just remember that all of the online resellers in the states pretty much use the same distribution channels and warehouses. That said, the ETA we've seen for first week in March for the 8104s will hold true for all places. 8103s not until mid March at the absolute earliest and perhaps early April. Best bet is order from the online store of your choice and get in line. There should be plenty of room if the warehouses get their intended allotment.

Thanks, Michael. I called PC Connection and spoke with Mary. She was great. I upgraded to 2G of RAM, so I can't wait!



Yeah, it's appearing that you are correct. That being said, I still put in orders to PC Connection, Random Source and PC Mall in the US, and Bytewize in Canada. We'll see who comes through first!

How to maintain desktop when lowering resolution?

Can anyone help me with this? I often need to lower the screen resolution on my TM8104 for clients to be able to see the text easily.

As soon as I'm finished and switch back to the native res. all of my desktop icons are in a different location.

How can I keep these icons from moving?

Belinda7:

Now that's what I call covering your bases!

Hey Guys, just a thought. Acer has got to see how popular the 8104 is right now. That being said, I think that if they wait too long, that popularity will drop off fast. Clevo/Sager is coming out with very similar configured laptops but with real PCI-e slots to make the graphics card upgradeable and with SATA hard drives. Eurocom (grossly overpriced by the way) has one of them in their orderable section:
EUROCOM D700T Enigma
http://eurocom.com/products/showroom...m?model_id=150
http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/D700T.asp

Review
http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=58978

It does have an Intel Pentium 4 in it though, and so people looking for more of a battery friendly solution might look at the M400A

EUROCOM M400A COBRA
http://www.eurocom.com/products/future/index.htm
http://www.clevo.com.tw/products/M400A.asp

This looks to be a 8104 killer if it will ever come out. Estimated shipping date is March 1st and so since you might have to wait a few weeks for any 8104s anyways, it might be a better option. I'm looking very closely at the M400A but it only has DDR-400 ram instead of the DDR2-533 of the TravelMate. I'm not sure what kind of difference this will make, so does anyone know? I'd also like to see an ATI X800 in this thing (since it is upgradeable) to see what kind of graphics increase it will have.

ROFL whoa there, you're not kidding

I priced up a M400a and got it close to 4K... I will definitely wait to see what Sager/PCT puts together for this one.

I see a lot of people ordering from different places. Has anyone looked at prices? I am about to pull the trigger on an order from Sparco.com. They seem to have the best prices and an expected delivery date the same as anyone else. Early in this thread there was talk of sparco.com but I have not seen it of late. Am I missing the boat on something here? Also, they are listing the eZdock (competitively priced? not sure) and the 2 year warranty upgrade for a good price. I was going to order from CDW until I stumbled on this. Not trying to be a cheapskate here, but if everyone stateside has identical shipping dates, why a more expensive retailer?

Try this:
Right-click Desktop area
Properties
Desktop tab
Customize Desktop button at bottom
Web tab
checkbox "Lock desktop items"

ABS informed me that they will add a sonoma notebook to the Mayhem line in April. No specs yet though.

I'm having some issues with the picture quality on the 8104. Perhaps I need to play around with the settings but with the factory default settings (highest resolution) I find the picture to be a bit grainy. This is specially true when watching DVDs. Has anyone else experienced this ? I'd be greatful if someoned can advise how I may tweak the setting to improve the picture quality.

That's because a dvd is normally 480 lines of resolution. You are stretching it which causes the graininess.

Thanks! I've set it and I'll let you know if it works. BTW: it has automatically "selected" all desktop items with blue highlight.

Thanks Maklar. If I understand correctly you are saying that due to the 8104 being widescreen, the 480 vertical lines of resolution are being stretched to fill the screen. Does this mean I should see an improvement if I playback in non-widescreen mode? I have tried this and doesn't seem to make any difference.

Acer # for a/c power adapter & cord listed below

I just finished ordering additional adapters & cords. I've been the only one that seems to need these but here are Acer's details: I ordered mine thru tech support:

Adapter: AP.06501.005 $17.22 + tax
Power cord: 27.A03V7.001 $7.22 + tax

Shipping $8.00

No promises but I think what you might be able to do is keep all your icons within the boundaries of the smaller resolution starting from the top left of your screen and don't leave that virtual window...

Uh how about this.. .say you run at 1600x1200 normally but for clients you use 1024x768...

make a desktop image with an easily visible border in mspaint that is 1024x768
set that to your desktop image
now keep all your icons inside of it.. (maybe chop off about 30 pixels for teh taskbar) and when you resize either direction your icons shouldn't move.

of course that might not work cuz i never tried it but its an idea.

I got my 8104 a couple of days ago. It is my first laptop and I am very happy with it.
Sorry for my poor english. I am Polish, living in Germany. There is one thing with my Acer which makes me a little nervous: at the very first start (after unpacking) I noticed, that the screen looked weird - the parts which should be black were poisonous-green, the resolutuin was some 640x480? with 16 colors. After 2-3 minutes everything went to normal...
The next day this behaviour was repeated once as I started the machine with a FlasCard-reader attached to USB-Port. And again that awful green disappeared by itself - it took a little longer, though. Now 2 days and several restarts are over and that phenomenon was a no show, thanks God.
But what do you think - what could that be? Any similar experiences?

And another questions for the forum-experts:
1. could you recommend any substitute for the WinXP-Bluetooth-Stack? I tried several Widcomm drivers from Internet but they refused to cooperate with Acer-device (no rights or something...) I couldn't find anything on Acer-CD's.
2. Has the Intel Wireless-Adapter an own control-programm with perhaps more options than Windows-Networking? Where to look for it?

Thanks a lot!

I, for one, did not take your post this morning as "advertising." I took it exactloy as you meant it- I was thankful to hear of someplace that had many of the 8104's in.

It is TRULY unfortunate, though, that you do not deliver to the US.!