ACER TravelMate 8104 "Sonoma" Review - Page 7

4200 t'would be a bummer. I've read there's a noticeable perf. difference between 4200 and 5400, very less noticeable between 5400 and 7200.

Don't have them in front of me but there's a System Disk, with Drivers, etc, with which you can start a Recovery, and 2 other CDs with a Ghost Image spread across them. The big drawback is that there is no actual OEM copy of WinXP. You can restore the original image (I presume) with the CDs and the Acer "eRecovery" software, but you can't actually format and install XP from scratch. Why it asks you to "backup now" on a new system is beyond me, since you already have the stock image on CD.

The eRecovery software is a fairly extensive effort by Acer, but it has other drawbacks too. You have Monitor.exe always running to see if you have hit the "hidden" Alt-10 keys to take you to recovery. You can do that or select eRecovery from the eManagement software (another running Acer thread). As noted in the Start\Programs|Acer Manual, your C: partition may be converted to NTFS if you want, but the D: must remain FAT32 in order for the eRecovery to function. (???) I used eRecovery to make a backup and it kicks off Ghost 8.0 and the familiar Ghost Image software if you've used that before. My options were to create an image on D: or on CD\DVD. I chose D: and it created 6-8 650MB .GHS files with others on the D: drive. It took up about 5-6GB and I wanted to move them to my external HDD but it kept telling me "files in use". I finally found that when I stopped Monitor.exe, and turned off the file attributes (RSHA) (don't know if that mattered) then I could copy them off the D: drive.

I like that Acer went to all the trouble for the eRecovery, I just wish they'd fine tune and upgrade it. The FAT32 has 32K clusters. I converted my C: drive to NTFS and it now has 4K clusters.

As discussed mainly in the big 8100 thread, you can create a bootable XP CD with SP2 slipstreamed and use your own license # from the bottom of your laptop, BUTTTT you must have a hard copy XP CD to start with. It's legal to do, but not everyone will have access to another XP CD. I'm still finishing my CD (can't get the bootimage.img to work, reboot gets "Cannot boot from this CD - Code 4) but I'm sure I'll get around that. I've created one that boots to PCDOS and from which I can run E:\I386\winnt.exe, which I think will get the same result, but I'd like to have the whole enchilada.

Here is the most detailed writeup on a CD. It has a link to those problematic boot images too. I'm going to try to complete with this when I get home.

PC Mag has a recent article on the same think (January I think) and I was using that but couldn't get the boot image right.

Surf on Eldergeek or Bart PE for further info.

Lemme know if you have more questions.

YO, SATAN! You out there?! Are your 8103s with 80GB 4200RPM or 100GB 5400RPM?

Most of the Froogles in the states list the 8103 with 100GB (presumably 5400RPM) drives. Most of us have thought all along the only differences between 8104 and 8103 was slightly less cpu (1.8-2.0) and RAM (512-1024) which made the 8103s very appealing.

Thanks.

Here's a link to the PCMag article. Somewhere in there it tells where to download the Networking version of SP2. You just run it and it integrates itself with the XP copy you have copied to HDD.

The main thing I miss is HyperThreading. The 8104 "thinks" a little longer than I'm used to, but that's probably also because stock it has 30-40+ threads running. Lotta nice bells and whistles for consumers. A reformat will clean that up.

Here is a start. The freebies of 05, 03, and 2001 are popular.

UNDER THE 8104 KEYBOARD:


Upper left: Fan. (Doh!) Right: DVD-CD player.

Lower left of center: Copper plate with ... heat pipe (?) going toward touchpad area.


Lower center: Flexible keyboard cable-strip.


I still suspect either the cpu or the X700 graphics is under the touchpad. Although the Wi-Fi on the bottom may generate some heat, I have it off a lot and there is still touchpad heat. When I'm gaming Wi-Fi is off, my laptop cooler is running, the bottom of the laptop is COLD, and the touchpad is still hot. When I'm done gaming the cpu temp is often up to 61-63C but drops quickly to the mid and low 50s.

Note the fan is in the upper left and the intake vents are scattered around the bottom of the laptop. Presumably the design is to pull air into the various areas and expel it by the fan (topside left).

No, I won't be disassembling my laptop any further. I'm not THAT curious.

Mebbe some screen pics tomorrow. I'm crashin'. (Know what you mean about buying sight unseen.)

SCREENSHOTS

Oops, forgot the Excel and greyscale. Sorry.







Dances With Wolves closeup on DVD