How's Acer Travelmate 8100 Series Doing For You? - Page 4

Considering a new laptop?

Not sure. The 8104 was excellent while it worked. Fast, light and relatively quiet. If it comes back fixed and without any "new" repair related problems, I'll be happy to keep using it.

I do have a serious case of "I want that" over the Asus Z70V refresh model, but its really nothing more than the 8104 in a different case. But, the wife is almost ready to retire her 800Mhz powerbook, and given Apple's move to x86 I probably won't be buying Apple in the interrum. I might just need to get a second P-M laptop. Heh Heh.

not good for me.. random shutdowns during gaming. Tried diff bios and all different drivers.

I think there's a problem with some of Acer's install CDs. Mine was definitely screwed up. I did a full reformat and reinstall with it, and still had problems. Now that I've done the same thing with a known good version of XP, and downloaded the drivers off the net, I've not had a single problem since. Oh, and I did get rid of the FAT32 formatting. Now I have 1 NTFS partition.

-Ransom

Final words?

Not to keep blabbing, but I'd like to give my current viewpoint on this notebook. The notebook itself is flawless. Best looking computer I've ever seen anywhere. BUT, the first thing that happened to me with it when I first booted it up was that Windows wasn't installed correctly, and I had to reinstall the entire operating system to get it to boot up all the way. Then the software included was so crappy that it was causing my system to run extremely slow and some things didn't want to open at all. Turns out it had to do with the program that was supposed to run the hotkeys at the top-right area of the keyboard (it was having trouble running). I don't usually use hotkeys, so I disabled it and that helped a lot. And as I've mentioned before, I reinstalled a clean version of Windows XP, and I've had absolutely no problems with the system since then.

However, when I went online yesterday to register my new notebook, Acer's site said that my Serial Number was invalid. So I had to call them up and have them add it to their system. This only took about 30 seconds of being on hold, and then the guy did it right then (the entire phone call took less than 3 minutes). I just bought the extended 2 year warranty for $124 off Acer's site. I've heard on here that you can buy it for around $80 from somewhere else and register it with Acer, but I wasn't able to find where on Acer's site that was done.

I've posted elsewhere about my 3dmark scores, so I'll leave that out here, but this thing played UT2004 so beautifully at the last LAN party I went to that I had most of the desktop guys jealous! (Well, except for Scott, but he's probably got the best computer in the state, considering that he owns www.techreport.com)

I can't take this thing anywhere without having everybody stop and comment on it. And they don't even know the half of it! Most people seem to think of notebooks (they always call them "laptops" ) as being slow and clunky. Not this baby.

The only things I don't like about this notebook are:

1. ATI hasn't released the newest Radeon drivers to Acer notebook users.
2. Gosh... I can't think of anything else! I've resolved any and all other issues I've had with it. Maybe that will be my second complaint; I had to resolve issues. It didn't have to be that way, the notebook itself is perfect. Come on Acer, get it right.

-Ransom