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Acer Aspire Timeline 3810TZ review

Verdict

Perfoming an almost perfect balancing act, the Aspire 3810TZ is a preternaturally accomplished ultraportable at a bargain price.

Review Date: 8 Mar 2010

Reviewed By: Sasha Muller

Price when reviewed: £404 (£475 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
6 stars out of 6

Performance
4 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

Aspire Timeline 3810TZ

8hr 44min

Full working day

+100%

The light-use test is the absolute longest you can expect the battery to last with careful power management.

Aspire Timeline 3810TZ

4hr 9min

Full working day

The intensive-use score is the battery life during very demanding, CPU and hard disk-intensive operations with power management turned off.

Aspire Timeline 3810TZ

0.67

3.2GHz Pentium D PC

PC Pro's application benchmarks test real-world performance in a range of applications. Click here

Aspire Timeline 3810TZ

5fps

Smoothly playable

Our 3D gaming benchmarks test gaming performance in Crysis, which remains one of the most challenging games available. Setting is 1,024 x 768 at low detail.

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Comments

User comments

Swallowed a dictionary

lol - preternaturally.
How long have you been waiting to use that work?

By Steve_Adey on 9 Mar 2010

Doh!

I meant word!

By Steve_Adey on 9 Mar 2010

He's lucky...

I'm still looking for a decent excuse to use chthonic or cyclopean. Blame Lovecraft.

By nichomach0 on 9 Mar 2010

An opportunity missed...

... to use Paradigm Shift.

(poem © 2010)

By JohnGray7581 on 9 Mar 2010

wrong thread

If you hop over to the iPad thread, you could describe it as a cyclopean iPhone.

By Steve_Adey on 9 Mar 2010

So excited by preternatural

that I forgot to point out that 'complimented' should have been 'complemented' in the second-to-last paragraph.
A star falls from heaven...

By JohnGray7581 on 9 Mar 2010

An opportunity missed...

... to use Paradigm Shift.

(poem © 2010)

By JohnGray7581 on 9 Mar 2010

Paradigm Shift
Is that a Scottish game bird?

By stokegabriel on 10 Mar 2010

hi

this is very good i want one

By casperando on 14 Apr 2010

hi

this is very good i want one

By casperando on 14 Apr 2010

Backup

Under OS/System it states Recovery method:Recovery partition, burn own recovery discs
I thought there was no optical drive - so am I right in thinking if you want to back up your £475 laptop you first need to additionally buy a USB DVD/CD writer?
I was interested in this laptop but if the above is true I'll go for one which has the optical drive included.

By Simeon on 1 May 2010

Dodgy trackpad

Just bought one of these on the basis of the review for my wife. On the whole, its a well put together machine. Unfortunately though, our trackpad refused to work properly in the out of the box Windows 7 install... no gestures, no tap to click, and the left mouse button didnt work. On the advice of Acer tech support, I did a factory reset which made no difference, and neither did downloading the latest synaptics drivers.

Strangely though, i've just tried the ALPS driver, which lets allows both buttons to work, but no multi-touch features.

I'm now unclear whether this a hardware or software problem.

Unfortunately, I think this laptop will pass the wife's approval... will be a pain if we have to send it back.

Keith

By mckeithyb on 14 May 2010