My New Acer TimelineX 4820TG

I mentioned last week that I got a new computer. It’s an Acer TimelineX 4820TG. So far I love it – 14” very thin and light. It’s replacing my old computer, which I got almost three years ago.

I spent the last six months regularly tearing my hair out over the dying-ness of my old computer, and feeling like I couldn’t replace it when it’s still technically working, because I hate the consumerism and waste.

But after I totally lost it when I was trying to send off an article for EOL past my deadline and the computer was crashing, Purple took me out to look at computers… and we came home with this!

Here it is in it’s packing box

and the box-in-a-box

I love the way it looks – it’s not overly shiny like my old one was, and not as much of a finger-print magnet. The brushed metal finish is really stylish.

opened for the first time

You can see it side by side with the old computer – it’s roughly the same footprint, but the new one is MUCH thinner and lighter

I love the keyboard on it – it feels great: I can type faster on it, and it didn’t take any getting used to, which is funny, since I had my old computer for almost 3 years, so you’d think I’d be used to that one by now. I love the touch pad – very smooth and responsive and I appreciate the multi-gesture functions.

The screen is significantly brighter than my old one – I didn’t take a photo of them both with the screen on (and I can’t be bothered now to boot up the old one for a demo), but the new one at 70% is as bright as the old one at 100% which is great.

The specs are great – Intel i5 Core 430M processor 2.26 GHz, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, and 1GB graphics card which is switchable to the cpu graphics to save power and battery.

Best of all, the battery lasts (with the right settings) around 8 hours. Right out of the box it came up 8 hours 18 mins on 97%, then I realised it was 4:20 and wondered why I was messing with my computer!

After I changed some settings it gave me close to 10 hours :) Of course, that drops a lot if I’m running lots of stuff, but I did get about 6.5 hours at the cafe the other day, on 100% screen brighness, running firefox, Word and the optical drive to rip DVDs all at the same time, which is pretty damn good. The sound system is also better – the volume goes way louder than the old one.

It does miss a few things that my old computer had – media buttons being the main one – there’s no dedicated buttons for play/pause, etc, even the volume control and mute keys are functions of other keys, which is irritating, but a minor one. My old computer had a remote control that was really nice for watching movies (which we do a lot, since we don’t have a TV).

The arrow keys are squished for no good reason. The screen and hinges do feel a little flimsy, but I think it will be fine as long as I don’t pick it up by the screen. It doesn’t have bluetooth either, which is only very slightly annoying, since I hardly ever use that anyway (only bt thing I have is my cell phone, and it has a USB cable anyways) and the same model with bluetooth was $400 more at another store. Anyway, they’re all cosmetic things really.

Overall, I’m very happy with this computer so far :) I can see, in hindsight, I was never really happy with the old one, right from the start.

The main thing the new TimelineX does that my old computer doesn’t is: WORK!!!