At the end....Acer travelmate 3210

After more than one month looking for a not very espensive, portable, with decent graphics laptop, I finally bought an acer travelmate 3212wxmi.
I haven't heard good stuff about acer, specially about its tech support, but this device is the one that fits my requirements perfectly so i take the risk.
It's a 14" wxga,PM 740 sonoma 1'73, 1gb ddr2, 60 gb hdd, and dvd dual layer burner. This is quite normal, but the features i like the most is the ATI X700 graphics card and the integrated bluetooth.
The price is quite impressive, 1140€(1370). It's quite portable, I guess it's around 2'2kg, but at the same time it's comfortable to work with.
My first impressions are good. I'm configuring and installingo all the programs, it's been powered on for 40 minutes now and the vent has always been off except when rebooting, so it's nice. The only thing it's that the keyboard is a bit flexing,anyway i hope i an deal with it. I'll post a reviw when i have the time.

 

Hey mate, I've got the Acer TM 3222WXMI, with similar specs. Really like the trade-off between portability and performance. Have had it for 3 months now and no prob so far.

 

glad to hear that!
what can youtell me about the x700and the battery life? how's the 64mb x700 compared to the 128 one? can you squeeze more han 3 hours batery life?

 

So far i'm very pleased with it, but there's one issue i'm a bit concerned. Although the laptop doesn´t get hot, the fan it's almost always on, not really fast, but it's audible. Is this normal, even when it's undervolted to 0'748V and it's running at 800Mhz? possible solutions? Thank you.

 

Try downloading SpeedFan

 

i've downloaded speedfan but i don't know what to do. I gues the criticalthing is the hard disc drive, because it's always at 50-53ºC.Any ideas?

 

Hey, with my TM3222WXMI I can get around 3 hours of battery life, at least with low display brightness. The fan is rarely on when in idle mode, or when doing office-type tasks like surfing, word processing etc. I have undervolted mine to 0.748V/1.056V, which really helped a lot in keeping the heat down. I also played around with the ATi card, which gets quite hot sometimes. Try underclocking it when not in use, it wont get you a dip in performance. Ati Tray Tools allow you to configure such things automatically.

 

Thank you.
Mine is undervolted to 0'748-1'068 with NHC. actually my fan is rarely on when typing or surfing,but there's a low buzz near the hdd, even if it's not been used. i don't know what's this.

 

well, the 'low buzz' comes from the HDD, be it spinning or not. When its spins up, it sounds a lot more, right? Don't think there is anything to do about it. Mine is quite silent anyhow, compared to friends' lappies.

 

I don't think it sounds more when it spins up. it's like a constant sound, like a vent blowing at minimum revs. Anyway it's not really important.

 

Hey there,

Oh my god I have found my family!

I own a TM3200 (has a Radeon 9700, 1.5 ghz ), don't why they are not selling a 14 inch in America anymore. I love size and weight of this machine. I have had it for 18 months and has been great.

Things that annoy me - fan comes on all the time. When it's not, a slight whining, from above sounds like it must be the hard drive.

Battery life - mmmm well I am not getting through a 1 hour 45 minute movie at the moment - probably get 2.5 to 3 hours on regular tasks. I wonder if increasing ram will help battery.

I'll try speed fan.

Overall it's one of the lightest weight 14 inch, Fujitsu are lighter but no graphic card and nearly $500 more! I am surprised Acer don't bring this model back over here.

 

I downloaded Speed Fan, looks scary for a non techie like me. Any risk in using speed fan?