How's Acer Travelmate 8100 Series Doing For You?

Wow! 100% rock solid rating as I post! This is SOME laptop!

Mine does run great and there are no problems with anything. My only personal, long term concern is the high cpu temps generated when gaming (70-74C on mine maxed out, 65-68C reported on others SpeedSwitched). If the temps do not lead to damage or shortened life, then that's fine with me. Time will tell. It's my "philosophy" that if I buy a laptop rated to run at certain specs (in this case 2Ghz cpu and new X700 graphics), then it should be able to run at those specs without any damage, near-term or long-term.

(Post a link to this thread in the big thread if you want a LOT of traffic!)

Hmmm. Not tonight, gotta go hunting with my tiger.

Safe travels in Azeroth

no problems at all with my 8104, and I'm very happy with it..

Runs everything I throw at and then some


if you guys play on shattered hand, give me a tell sometime, got a 60 mage named paytun.

i am ok with my fourth laptop. i had to go through four to find a good one

and this forth one, well has a very very little dead pixel that u can only see on black..

other than that, the wireless drops a lot but i dont mind i have another wireless card that i use..

funny thing is.. that all four laptops had dead pixels . thats really low quality control on asus part

I've had my 8104 for just over week now and I've had no major problems with mine, I have one dead pixel in the very top left corner, but it doesn't bother me at all. I have seen it up around 83 degrees while gaming, but it's never crashed on me. Seems to idle around 50 most of the time

I havent tried the wireless networking so I can't comment on it, the power brick does make a bit of noise, and gets fairly hot,but if I hadn't read about it here I probably wouldn't have noticed.

Overall I'm pretty happy with it

Well, I've had my 8103 for about a month now, gotta say, it's a beast!!!
Chews up anything you care to throw at it, no mercy!

This is actually my first Acer and indeed my first laptop, very impressed.

Hi,

Running smooth and goood. Only little thing is the white line, which ill try to fix with new drivers or with Powerstrip-software.

Other than that. its sooo perfect Gotta love it.

Ouzo

Which program are you using to monitor temperatures inside the 8104?

Azeroth and high temps

So far my 8104 has had a few 6+ hour WoW sessions with zero ill effects. The fan is going full out, and temps are high, but its never crashed or displayed any heat related instability.

Mine does too. I had it replaced in case the noise meant impending failure. The old brick was liteon, the new one is delta. The new one is quiet but gets just as hot under load.

My power brick is made by Delta, I have to put my ear right against it to hear anything

Mine's been sent back to be replaced due to the power switching issue (switching between AC + DC profiles when attempting to recharge from below 10%). Should have a new one by midweek.

My experience with it when it was working was great, though. I found it easy to switch to having only ever used desktops before. It ran all the software in the Adobe CS suite like a champ and I experienced only the tinyest bit of delay when I was using my wacom intuos 3 to render with complex brushes on very high resolution, many-layered images, which is impressive considering I get the same with my P4 3.06 HT desktop (same amount of memory). Also, I played a spot of Counterstrike:Source with the grapics all the way up and goodness gracious was it ever beautiful.

I'm on my second 8104 now for 3 weeks and it's superb. I firmly believe that my first one had driver problems when caused oveheatin issues with video card.
My only complaint thus far with my replacement is slight stuttering during dvd and games and I'm still investigating this.

Not too good far. Waiting for my second 8104 to show up. The first one worked fine for a little while, then Windows blue screened. When attempted to reboot it the blue screens each time at the same time point in the boot process. I managed to boot off a special home-made recovery CD that I have and pull the memory dump off. After a little debug work I found that it was an exception in the Plug-and-Play device drivers. Specificly the PCMCI(PC Card) system. Thinking this might be a bad or corrupt driver I reloaded from the recovery CDs. The recovery CD was able to put the Ghost image back onto the disk (note no PCMCIA drivers are loaded at this time) Again, a blue screen on start up. I then attempted to load XP off a retail boxed XP CD. This time it blue screened during the loading phase. The stop errors for each of these (0xCA) points back to the Plug-and-Play device detection. Then it hit me! The Ghost part of the restore worked because it was running in DOS and had no drivers loaded. I then attempted to load both Red Hat Linux 9 and Fedora Linux Core 3. Both of these again crashed on the PCMCIA devices. After enabling some advanced setup error logging on Linux is does show a critical error back when enumerating devices. Bad hardware is sending some strange info back that the system can't understand.
Anyway, not ready to write Acer off yet. The specs on this system are far too nice. I hope I just got a bad unit and the second one will run fine. It does raise concern for some of the other issues I've read on here.
I do have to say that at this point I am very unimpressed with Acer's tech support. I filled out the web based request for support more than 36 hours ago and still no answer. At lest the tech support at my point of purchase had a phone number for Acer (which they don't seem to publish on the support website). After calling them I was told it would be a 7 to 10 day turn around time. What? Another week for what was basicly a DOA system? Maybe I just expect too much. Lucky for me my point of sale was willing to RMA the system and over-night me a replacment. Can't say anything good about Acer support right now. But I can't say anything bad about PC Connection, they've been great.
Here's to good luck with round two.
Sorry for the rather long post...just needed to rant.
-Faust

I've reached 82-84C with mine with an ambient temperature of 24-25C after playing FarCry with Aniso4x for two hours, 1280x768 - all settings:High except shadows: Medium and lighting: Very high (to get shaders 2.x) - getting 40+ fps (between 40 and 70 fps).

From my understanding, the CPU has a maximum operating temperature of 100C.
It enters thermal throttling at 93C and then again at 97C (probably turning off the power to the CPU).
That should ensure no irreversible damage occurs to the CPU.
I think we're safe around 80C - it shouldn't shorten the CPU life.
If anybody knows more about this issue please join the discussion.

I wonder what will happen at an ambient temperature of 35C...