Home > Consumer Reviews > Acer Aspire Timeline AS1810T-8679 11.6-Inch Blue Laptop - Over 8 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium)

I wanted something small, light, powerful with long battery life.

I had to send it back because the keyboard had some keys that did not work. So now I am waiting on a replacement, had to wait a while to get it so so kind of a bummer.

pros:
- battery life was as promised, 5-7 hours depending on what you do.
- way faster than my old N280 netbook (others report passmark of 891).
- variable speed fan runs a lot but is quiet even at some of the midrange speeds. The targus (10") netbook chill mat fits it nicely. Has vents on the bottom so a netbook cooler helps.
- Memory and HD doors on the bottom, this is a big plus for me. HD easy to change, be sure to undo the ribbon cable connector before lifting the HD out.
- Win7 reports 3999 Mb of total RAM (pretty good).
- BIOS can boot from USB devices (needed for emergency recovery).

cons:
- build quality seems a bit low, guess I am used to business model Dell's.
- screen flickers slightly, as if the brightness setting is unstable, but is otherwise crisp and bright.
- keyboard didn't work on my unit, feels cheap like my netbook did.

fyi:
- Comes with a 12Gb recovery partition, it prompts you to burn recovery DVD's, have to buy a USB dvd. You can order recovery Dvd's from Acer's support website. They appear to be bootable DVD's but I did not try them. Documentation says restoring from the DVD's does not remake the recovery partition, but preserves it if it is there.
- comes with a cloth sleeve, buy a better case if you want protection.

The price is right so no complaints if it works.

The processor is just a little too underpowered for my taste. I.e. some common tasks take longer than on my >3 yr old AMD 64 X2 3600+ But otherwise, the hardware on this thing is great. It's a dainty power sipper. Only 10 watts to the CPU. Nutty. Even the large-ish HD sips the juice. Windows 7 booted up and shut down considerably faster than XP. But man oh man, what a pain in the dark side otherwise. (win7)

A key app for my business (Webposition) wouldn't run correctly on Win7, so I had to downgrade to XP. However, Acer will not provide ANY support with XP downgrades on this model. The first person just hung up on me. The second was rude and wouldn't even tell me which of the three webcam drivers listed on their site for the 1810T/XP was the correct one. Lame.

Had some trouble installing XP b/c 1810T wouldn't recognize my new external CD/DVD as a boot disk (Samsung SE-S084) unless I turned off AHCI mode in the BIOS. Problem is... when you do that, you can't easily switch back to SATA/AHCI from IDE once the OS is installed... so your HD might not perform up to its potential.

If I both liked and could use Win7 for key apps, I'd give this Acer a full five stars... but well, I don't and I can't so I didn't. So many contractions.

Before I managed to get XP to load I called Tiger Direct for a RMA. They sent the pre-paid UPS sticker via email in seconds. So kudos to them. (I've heard so many bad things about Tiger Direct over the years, perhaps partially unfounded.)