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I received my 8204 couple of days ago. The laptop itself is beautiful. The exterior finish is very nice. When i first started it up, i was a bit disappointed with the quality of the LCD screen. It was not as bright as i was expecting it to be. I owned a Dell Inspiron 6000 before this and it had a brighter screen (though it was much more 'sparkly' so i did not like it too much).
Also, on starting up the partial Windows installation completed and a whole bunch of Acer programs were installed. I have always liked to keep my installation lean so i knew the first thing to do was to reinstall from scratch.
Incidentally, i ran Super Pi on my Acer and the time to compute to 2M digits was a super slow 3 mins 10 seconds. I dont know why it was so bad. Owners of this laptop might want to check the performance by running this program. As per the reviews i read i knew it should be around 1 min 15 seconds.

I burnt a DVD of the Acer restore disk and downloaded all the drivers from the Acer Euro support site for later use. I had a WinXP Pro CD with SP2 and Post SP2 updates built in. I also applied XPize Lite to the CD image before using it.
I then rebooted the laptop with this CD and reformatted the drive and created a 8GB FAT32 partition to install Windows XP Pro. I also created two more partitions of 80 and 20 GB for programs and data.
I chose FAT32 for the partition containing Windows (and basic applications) because it should have slightly better performance over NTFS.

Installation was smooth and right after that, i installed the 8204 drivers that i had downloaded earlier. The laptop seemed much more snappy now. I also liked the little tweaks in the GUI that XPize adds such as this new file copy animation -

Incidentally, i also had the wireless/wired LAN problem that other people have reported but after the fresh install, it went away. As far as the driver for wireless goes, i chose the option to only install the driver and not the Intel Proset Application. This way i can use Windows XP built in wireless configuration which works just fine for me.
The only thing i dont have working right now is Bluetooth, but i will work on that later. Its not a priority for me.

I also installed Sandra 2005 SP3 for benchmarking

Here is the info about my machine -



Yes, i know my RAM is DDR2 533 (not 667 as Acer originally said ). I am talking to TigerDirect about it but definitely will not return the laptop for this oversight. Would be nice to get an apology and some discount

BTW, i also ran Super Pi once again and now the speed is a scorching 1 min 11 seconds.



Here are some more benchmarks from Sandra. It shows this laptop is in the big league with the Pentium Ds and the Athlon X2s and FXs !!!





Memory bandwidth could have been faster but its still extremely good for a laptop. Sure would love to know what this figure would be for DDR2 667 RAM



The file system benchmark was also pretty decent. My Acer 8204 registered 35MB/s. Unfortunately i dont have the screen shot for that test and dont want to run it again (since it took half an hour) but please take my word for it . The screenshot below shows the figures for other machines



I finally got my LCD to look pretty decent. I changed the Gamma from the default value of 1.05 to 1.2 and now the screen brightness is good and more even for the viewing angle i use (which i would assume to be pretty standard).

At this point, i am really loving this laptop. It has great build quality, low noise , low heat emission (you can feel it coming out of the touchpad and mostly from a vent on the right side but its definitely less intrusive than my Dell Inspiron 6000) and is FAST !!!!!

BTW, i had one problem with the touchpad scroll buttons not working in Firefox so i downloaded the latest Synaptics touchpad driver and that problem is taken care of too. In fact, i have reconfigured the left and right buttons to go back and forward one page which is really convenient.

I also ran 3DMark 2006 and got a score of 1889
My 3DMark 2005 score was 4404



Overall, i am very happy with my new laptop. I am waiting for ATI to release the final version of their AVIVO Xcode software which should eventually get incorporated by software vendors into their own products (e.g. Nero Recode). This will let us owners of X1000 series of graphics cards enjoy huge performance gains when dealing with video (playback or converting a DVD to a DivX file). However, I do feel that i overpaid ($2500) for this laptop. I am quite sure that in around 3 months, a laptop of such specs will be available for around $2000 from someone and that would have been a good price to buy it at. Its always a bad idea to buy when demand is more than supply . But thats just me.
Of course, prices will always keep falling but if you need a laptop now and cannot wait, then go for it. This one will make you happy

UPDATE : I tried ripping a DVD on this laptop and was surprised to see how slowly it was coming along, so i ran the Nero CD-DVD Speed program to find out its read speed and was pretty disappointed with the result . Average of 3.07x ??? Pretty much all the new laptop drives (like NEC ND-6650A that i owned before) are 8x read speed. Why do they have to put crappy components into a $2500 laptop ? Anyone else want to run a test to see if they're getting a different result ?

Tag. Laptop sounds awesome, cant wait for mine to arrive. I ordered from NCIX, to the tune of 2150 with insurance. So couple hundred dollar price cut for a 2-3 week wait. I'll take it.

Thanks for the review, those benchmarks are really helpful. Could you please post your opinion about the screen, possibly with some pictures? The brightness/quality of the screen is the determining factor of purchasing for me...thanks andy!

Thanks for the very detailed review I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of mine and any thing I can read about the model I gobble up so to say. Anyways I have a quick quesiton about the XPize lite, how exactly did you apply that to your copy of XP before installing it? Did it require you to burn another CD with XP on it? Sorry if the question is really stupid but I was curious because I"m really considering doing a fresh install once I've made a copy of the recovery partition because I want the performance of a fresh install.

I'm pretty sure the 2500 figure is in Canadian dollars.
If it's 2500 US you got scammed! :P

You've restored my confidence in my order. Great review.

I see you also cannot publish your results from 3DMark - I assume it's because like mine, your CPU is listed as "Unknown 2000 Mhz"?

Wait. How the heck did you get a 3DMark05 score of 5174 ??? Did you use different drivers or overclock your Radeon ?

Both of the above

I force-installed Catalyst 6.2's and overclocked the X1600 to 529/558 using ATI Tool.

^^

do you think you could do a quick write up on how to do this?

Sure, here's how:

1. Downloaded the desktop 6.2 drivers

2. Initiate install (extracts the driver files), it will say that the drivers can't be installed - exit out.

3. (Optional) Use "Mobilemod" to edit the inf file in the Driver\2KXP_INF directory where the driver files were extracted.

4. Go into device manager, and select the display adaptor.

5. Click the Driver tab, then Update Driver button.

6. Select "No, not this time".

7. Select "Install from a list or specific location".

8. Select "Don't Search.."

9. Click "Have Disk" and browse to the CX_30152.inf file under the Driver\2KXP_INF directory.

10. Scroll way down the list and select "Radeon X1600 Series".

OK away and reboot. Voila!

As for ATI Tool it's pretty intuitive, you'll figure it out

awesome, thanks for the info, i will be trying this when i get home

At your own risk of course!

well, i got the driver installed fine but ATItool doesnt seem to recognize the card...

correction, just got the newer beta version. working great