Monday, April 03, 2006

More on the Acer TMC204TMI

I've had it almost two weeks now and I'm very pleased. Of course right after I bought it, there was a $200 or so price drop. Oh well, that always seems to happen with tech stuff.

Likes:
  • I love the flip up to laptop, flip down to tablet. Not that the twist for tablet is bad, this is just a little easier. I am concerned about the screen being protected. Tom Bihn has some laptop cases for in a backpack that look fairly sturdy. I'll have to check them out. I also purchased the Acer Total Notebook Protection.
  • The quality of the pen interaction. It seemed I was always fighting with the pen on the Averatec. Not so here. The bulk of my time has been in OneNote 2007, but the pen works nicely.
  • The trackpoint. I am not a touchpad guy at all. This works nicely except for dragging something, I still don't have the hang of that. I didn't get it on the touchpad either.
  • The angle of the screen in laptop mode. I was concerned about this but it works nicely.
  • The lack of non-Acer crapware on the machine. There was a trial of Norton Anti-Virus but that was it.
  • The fingerprint reader (when it works, about 50% of the time) is cool.
  • Cross Executive Stylus (not included with the Acer). I'm a pen guy. I love fountain pens. This is much nicer than the included pen. The included pen works well, I have no complaints about it. It is miles beyond the cheesy one with the Averatec.
  • Weight with the 3 cell battery. It is nice and light. Very usable. The 6 cell isn't bad, but I can feel the difference between the two.

Dislikes:

  • There is so much Acer stuff installed on here ethis and ethat. I'm not sure what is necessary and what isn't.
  • The drive partitioning. It came in 2 50 gig partitions and one little puker recovery partition. I had to convert everything to NTFS to be able to repartition. I'm still trying to figure out what I can do with the PQService partition.
  • The 4200 RPM drive seems slow, I'm not sure how much a 5400 or 7200 will improve that.

Not so sure about yet:

  • Battery life. I haven't really run the machine on battery enough to get a feel.

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