Acer Timeline X 5830T

Acer has ploughed itself a nice furrow over the last few years, building nice-looking, well-made laptops. The 5830T might lack the instant recognition and wow-factor of the Apple MacBook Pro, but there’s no arguing that it’s a nice-looking system. The wrist-rest is finished in a light metallic blue, and while the metal strip …

[Citizen Kaned]

£700??

"the trackpad automatically switches itself off when you’re typing, which can be handy if you’ve ever sighed in exasperation as your mouse pointer jumps around in Word."

useless for those of us that need to ctrl+click then....

also, £700 for an i3 laptop? i just got one for someone at work that was £450 for an i5 2410m with 4Gb RAM

[Ian McNee]

Six hundred notes??

Am I missing something? £600 for a middling Core i3 laptop with a paint job + design tweak? I'm struggling to see what one is paying £150-200 for compared to similar slabs from other reputable manufacturers like Asus.

For this price one can get either same spec + ultralight or fancy CPU+GPU or multimedia wizardry like Blu-ray and nice sound.

[AndrueC]

>Am I missing something? £600 for a middling Core i3 laptop

Yes. You're missing £100

:D

[Robert E A Harvey]

Did you boot Linux to find out what worked and what didn't? And if not, why not?

[Marvin the Martian]

Are you suggesting it wouldn't work out of the box?

You mean all this Ubuntu userfriendliness is a lie?! Heretic!!

[AndrueC]

Why should they? I thought Linux was supposed to be a mainstream OS these days. Are you suggesting that there are still questions over whether it will work on machine 'X'?

Good Lord.

[Matt_payne666]

Cheap??

Cripes... when was the last time you bought a laptop?? 2005!!!

You can have 2 very nice dell vostro laptops with the same spec, but a metal top+bottom... or a couple of i7 machines for a couple of quid more

[Jamie Kitson]

Multi Touch

Isn't all the gesture stuff down to the driver? ie, it's not specific to this laptop? I'm sure the synaptic driver can do all that on any laptop.

[Frederic Bloggs]

Multitouch is as much an attribute of the touchpad as it is the driver. As I found out when I bought a cheap (sub £300) Ebuyer (Clevo constructed) laptop. It is a great little box with 1400x800 screen and a decent (for the time) 2.2Ghz Core-Duo and it runs linux out of the box (no Window Tax to pay).

Only two problems, the synaptics driver says it is a single touch pad (unlike the Asus unit this laptop replaced) which a surprise and also the VGA port could not be made to scale to 1900x1200 like the Asus - even though it has a later version of the same Intel VGA chip.

[Volker Hett]

Ergonomic nightmare!

The off center keyboard and trackpad would drive me nuts! In the 80's I used to work on a system where the keyboard with number pad was centered in front of the screen, I still have trouble with my neck and shoulders from that.

[ColinP]

Nice

This looks like a good machine and I'm glad that laptop makers are getting in on the act of making stylish computers. It's a shame that the stylish ones are all Intel i3s with integrated graphics though, as I'd buy one if it could do at least some basic gaming. I'm waiting until they put an AMD Llano (or its successor) into one of these.

[Chris 171]

Acer - Count me pleasantly surprised

As a Sony fanboy (now on the wane) I tried a Vaio out at the £700 pricepoint & was massively dissaponted - back it went (the thing rattled ffs).

Got a 5750 i3 & 6gig of RAM for £450 - its a truly great machine built better than the Vaio for a start & chunters through anything I ask of it PDQ (mainly photos / timelapse stuff). Batterylife isnt amazing (3hrs med use) but at least its easily replaceable in this model, although by the time its kaput Ill be buying a new machine anyway.

With regard to the resolution, 768 is right for this size machine I think, text just gets too small otherwise & maybe BD would be nice for future proofing but its certainly not an essential.

As for graphics oomph, when hooked up to the TV via HDMI its perfect - there are some very good NASCAR streams on JTV that look great - PS3 is for games in my house.

All in all Acer make good kit & my experience with this machine may even convince my to buy one of their stabslabs when the mood takes me.

[nichomach]

I respectfully disagree...

...on the resolution question; OK, 1366x768 works for you, fine, but I think a lot of people would like the option of a higher res on a screen that large.

[Richard Johnson 1]

I just can't get used to the trackpad being off set all the way to the left on these Acer laptops, it feels very lopsided

[Furbian]

Not forgetting...

Acer's legendary reliability, I've got their, at the time, all singing, all dancing 8920G, 18.1" screen et. etc., shame it's sound chip died within a year (they managed to not fix it by ignoring the international travellers warranty), and the next year, the screen died too. A laptop that needs an external screen and a sound add-on!

Spectacular. Oh and the Aspire 9504, £1200 in it's time... oh I can't be bothered typing, or cut pasting, another Acer horror story.