3 Years on and still rocking (Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi)

Member Name: tlmartin

Product:	Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi
Date:	26/05/09 (101 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It has everything

Disadvantages: It overheats and can cause other componenets to fail

Well I have no intention of going to the depths Graham has in his earlier review it wil ljust waste your time reading both. His is very excellent and I tend to agree on the most part. What I will do is give an overview of my model and any problems I have had with it. I am too reviewing this as now the 3 year date is coming to an end there will be plenty of these appearing on Ebay as peoples warranty is running out.

I was looking for a laptop and knowing you can't easily upgrade laptops if i was going to spend laptop money, back in 2005, I wanted somethign that would last atleast 3 years without suffering performance issues and that woul be a laptop, that I could carry around with me.

For starters it has a 15.4" screen so a normal size, but wait it can handle a resolution of 1680x1050. Trying to find a 19" monitor for a cheap price to display a resolution like that has been impossible they are all over £200, luckily I managed to get a 24" 1920x1080 monitor for £160 at the beginning of May, where as its now over £200 again. So to get this kind of quality over 3 years ago in a monitor, WOW.

It came with a top end graphics card with 256mb dedicated memor (not much now, but back then that was top end spec) and not only that it could also share another 256mb from the system (on the fly, Hyper Memory) to enable 512mb of graphics memory. I have played quite a few games on this laptop and it has done them very well.However I do suspect it would have trouble getting top end frame rates out of new FPS games.

It has as standard 2GB of ram (2x 1GB dimms) I could replace with 2x 2GB and I have contemplated it as it would only cost £30.

It has a 2ghz core duo processor, again this had only just been released back then and it was speedy.

the Hard drive is 120GB plenty fo storage there, equally split over 2 partitions.

It has a Dual Layer DVD +- ReWriter, that has been used often and still works well.

Built in blue tooth again works well, used it for dialup internet connection on mobile to get 115k speeds.
Has built in dialup modem
has built in wireless Nic good quality

has built in 1Gbit wired Nic, Now this does have a problem, upon a fresh install the NIC will continually drop in and out. Now there was a reported patch for this which involved a firmware update, unfortunately by the time I found it Acer had removed it from being available and demanded returns of laptop. However I did notice as soon as I installed HP Printer driver for my network printers the network card immediately settles down and works perfectly.

There are 4 USB 2.0 ports on the laptop giving plenty of ports

A PCI xpress slot that i;ve not uised and a normal card slot.

There is also a security card slot, I have never used this, however you need to ensure you keep it safe otherwise being hardware based it does compeltely lock the computer from use if you loose the cards, so excellent business security, not great if forgetful and want to play.

There is a multi memory card reader on the front of the laptop which allows for memory cards to be read easily and quickly, although its a slot in and then pull out drive, not spring loaded. This means if your using an adapter for micro cards, get the pliers out to get the main card out (as has happened to me a few times)

The laptop has both a VGA and DVI port on it, and both of thouse output high quality video to a monitor.

There is a bui9lt in webcam that I have never had a problem with, which is pretty good to use, again this was a first back then.

The sound quality is good through the internal system however I have used USB Logitech speakers just for that extra ooomph with music.

I have had 2 returns of it to Acer, It was defaintely worth getting the 3 Year warranty. y first return was due to the hard drive dying. This was as I rported back then overheating. This laptop roasts your hands in winter. The amount of heat it produces is high and the air vent is on the mouse side of the keyboard, if your right handed. When they had it they said they cleaned the heatsink and replaced the hard drive. it worked fine then a year later it was getting far to hot so I took a few screenshots of the temp being 70-80C during REST, I returned it on that basis and they replaced the heatsink (they couldn;t really say anythign, it should not be that hot under full usage let alone at rest)

Overall this laptop is pretty fantastic, still. I am using it as my main PC today it handles all my work, a few games (spore) it allows me to do what I need. and to be honest by todays standards its still pretty highly specced. Also this laptop is the one that pretty much introduced all of those funky features we take for granted today 2gb RAM, webcam, 256MB dedicated graphics card. Although to be fair there are still very few with such a good quality screen that can handle a resolution of 1680x1050.

Oh yeah, and if you do have one after 3 years, get a spare battery off ebay (even if its a lower mAhs) its well worth having, my main battery died last month.

2 months after I bought this PC, my fiance got an identical one, there are some design flaws fixed, the network card, the overheating (tis still hot but no where as much) and the hard drive controller chipset is different for the SATA drive. That laptop had no problems, but I got mine in Feb 2006 which was when it was released, she got hers in May 2006.

If you can see this laptop available for a cheap price, its definately worth getting, especially for the high resolution work area.

Summary: This laptop rocks and still rocks, there are very few laptops with a better spec today

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