4 Responses to “Cheapest Price: Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820T-6447 14-Inch Laptop (Black Brushed Aluminum)”

1. M. Zankich says:

   February 20, 2012 at 7:12 pm

   30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

   
   I want to love it, September 8, 2011

   By 

   M. Zankich (USA) –
     

   This review is from: Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820T-6447 14-Inch Laptop (Black Brushed Aluminum) (Personal Computers)

   Ultimately, I am disappointed in the purchase of this computer. The electronic hardware is nearly perfect. Adding an SSD made it absolutely sublime. The aesthetics of the machine are clean and attractive. It’s thin, it’s light, it runs forever on a charge, and it has enough grunt to do everything I’ve ever thrown at it. On paper, it is the computer I have wanted for years. But there are two fatal flaws. I’ll get back to that in a second. First, the model I am using is a 4820T-3697. The specifics are that it came with a Core i5-480M, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, DVD-RW optical drive, and an extended battery. I have further upgraded it by replacing the HDD with an SSD (OCZ Agility2). The extended battery has 2 or 3 more cells than the standard and protrudes from the bottom of the chassis. Extending them rearward would have been more desirable but that would not have fit under the screen with the way it opens. With the extended battery and SSD, I am frequently able to achieve 10-12 uptimes unplugged. This was about 15-20% shorter with the standard hard drive, and the extended battery should be holding about 50% more charge than the standard one. This leads me to believe the standard configuration should consistently reach 6-8 hours under light (web browsing) usage. Running moderately intensive usage like watching movies or running flash applications will drain the batteries about 30% faster and extremely CPU-intensive applications will drop this to as little as 2-3 hours with either battery. The screen is very thin, bright, and (to my mostly untrained eyes) very accurate on color reproduction. I have only ever needed to adjust it above the second dimmest setting when using the computer outdoors. The tactility of keyboard is not as bad as many of the reviews led me to believe, and I have no problem touch-typing on it. However, it is difficult to keep clean and this particular one has always had problems with the “t” key not detecting key presses up to 15-20% of the time and the “k” key creating double k’s on as many as 3-5% of its key-strikes. Needless to say, I spend a lot of time proofreading and have relegated this machine to entertainment-only duties. This is enough for me to suggest caution in deciding to purchase this machine. The really vexing flaw I have found is in the hinge design. After about 4 weeks of daily usage, the left hinge began to make creaking and snapping sounds. Within another 2 weeks, the right hinge began to follow suit. I thought the screen bezel may simply have been loose as the sounds would stop for a while when I firmly squeezed near the hinges. However, I noticed a crack developing in the bezel. The the designers’ credit, the screen assembly was easy to take apart, and did no require me to disassemble the base first. However, what I found in there was disheartening. Each hinge is attached to the ‘lid’ by means of a small metal and plastic tab glued to the inside of the aluminum back-plate. The contact area of these tabs is less than a square inch each. The natural tendency of opening the lid from its outer edge will place large flatwise tensile stresses that will destroy the adhesive bond within hundreds to thousands of cycles. It is not a question of if it will break but rather when. It is an inherently flawed design. I reattached the tabs using some epoxy. Hopefully they will least longer with my glue than they did with Acer’s. I really cannot believe that such a short-sighted design made it into production. For any owners that have already purchased one or prospective owners who think they can live with it, I would advise ALWAYS opening the lid by gripping as close to the hinges as possible. My first round of fixing involved replacing the failed adhesives with with a brand, type, and chemistry that I trust. If this fails, I will have to decide between drilling the aluminum for mechanical fasteners and/or devising a longer contact plate to better transfer the torque when moving the lid. There is one more annoyance that was relatively easy to fix. The Acer-specific version of the Synaptics touch-pad driver is hopelessly outdated and include a bug that causes the edge scrolling feature to not function for approximately 20% of windows sessions. Luckily, with the SSD I added, the reboot to fix this would only take 20 or so seconds. Eventually I found the reference driver on the Synaptics website and in addition to fixing the fail-to-initiate bug, it adds several other handy features that are not included in the Acer version. As for a star score, I’m left with quite a dilemma. On the electronic hardware alone and its usefulness, this should be a 5 star machine. Ultimately, due to broken-out-of-the-box keyboard and horribly misguided hinge design (which, according to some sources online can damage the screen if broken and not addressed), I would recommend against purchasing…

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2. Chandra Moore says:

   February 20, 2012 at 8:00 pm

   1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

   
   Initial Impression, January 10, 2012

   By 

   Chandra Moore –

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: Acer Aspire TimelineX AS4820T-6447 14-Inch Laptop (Black Brushed Aluminum) (Personal Computers)

   I’ve only had this laptop for 24 hours. If my opinion changes in the next month or so I’ll update this review. Otherwise the following will constitute my final opinion. Also, I won’t rehash the technical specs because you can just read those yourself in the item description. Instead I’m going to concentrate on what I wanted and what I feel like I got.Ok, so I really thought about making the switch to a MacBook just because of the magnetic power cord attachment and just because in my experience Mac’s are so elegantly and solidly engineered. However, I don’t like Mac software and the price of them is too steep for me. So after doing a fair bit of research I went with this laptop. Wow! This thing is nice, brushed stainless steel. I really like the keyboard layout and feel. The screen is beautiful. The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop. All the connections feel solid. (I’ve had problems with things like the power cord getting a good connection with prior laptops, hence part of my interest in Macs.) The machine feels lightweight, but not cheaply constructed. It seems pretty solid but compact. Also, it operates very quietly with no fan buzz or annoying mechanical whine. The only negative is the lack of a blu-ray drive, but that’s not really an issue for me.Overall, this laptop feels like a superior quality item at a low-budget price. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone looking to buy a new laptop.
3. Egret says:

   February 20, 2012 at 8:30 pm

   41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

   
   Excellent value and performance, March 30, 2011

   By 

   Egret –

   This review is from: Acer AS1430Z-4677 11.6-Inch Laptop (Diamond Black) (Personal Computers)

   Just a quick few comments. I bought a 1430Z (from another vendor, where it was cheaper at the time) mainly because: o It has more screen pixels than 10.1″ netbooks do o CPU benchmarks I found on the web were much better than for typical Atom processors o It’s considerably lighter and smaller than 13.3″ notebooks o It comes with more memory than typical netbooks do My intention (as with all my computers) was to run Ubuntu Linux, dual booting occasionally into Windows. My impressions so far: Pros: o Nice compact form factor. It’s even a tad lighter than the spec; mine weighs just under 3 lbs o Ubuntu 10.10 works. But I had to blacklist 2 modules (intel_ips and acer-wmi). o External VGA gives you a full extended desktop (at least in Ubuntu, haven’t experimented in Windows): I get 1366×768 on the notebook and 1680×1050 on a 22″ external monitor at the same time. This has not worked well or at all on other notebooks I’ve had in the past. o Applications respond snappily — this is subjective of course. Video is good. I also run my own CPU-intensive simulation benchmark on all my computers to compare them. The 1430Z (Intel U5600 CPU) is about 26% slower than a desktop with an AMD 5000+ CPU, 18% faster than a notebook with an Intel SU7300 CPU, and 11% faster than a notebook with an Intel Pentium M 1.73GHz CPU. Cons: o Battery life is OK but unexceptional — this is only subjective since I haven’t measured it. But battery life has never been a high priority for me. For all my laptops it has dropped precipitously after a year or so, no matter how impressive it may have been when new. o The Keyboard lacks the feel of a great keyboard, like the classic Thinkpads of yore, or a decent desktop keyboard. And the Home/End/PgUp/PgDown/Up/Down/Left/Right are squashed together in the lower right; I don’t know if I’ll ever learn to find them without looking. Overall then, this fits the bill for me: portability, performance, and Linux.
4. Chris666 says:

   February 20, 2012 at 8:41 pm

   49 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

   
   Litle fast Notebook – NOT netbook, February 21, 2011

   By 

   Chris666 (Illinois) –

   Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

   This review is from: Acer AS1430Z-4677 11.6-Inch Laptop (Diamond Black) (Personal Computers)

   I got this Notebook for my wife, and I checked some specification before purchase : -CPU architecture SandyBridge 32nm, Intel relased it in Jan 2011, very low power consumption -18W. -3GB latest DDR 3 memory, upgradable to 8GB – more then enough -wireless 802.11 b/g and latest n -Windows 7 64bits -very good HD screen resolution It is more powerfull then most devices in this size, has around double power then Atom CPU, and pretty fast wireless internet, with my D-link Extreme 655 router in the basement I got 15Mbps net speed on first floor , (19Mbps when connected with Cat 6 wire). When I run it first time the speed when not connected to the power cord was slower – some power saving settings, after adjusting it in the Laptop and in the router, I got full speed. No problem watch YouTube HD (I have very fast Comcast Internet), and streaming my movies over network. Then we are very happy with it , my wife love it how it looks like and because it is very light.