Archive for July 22nd, 2006

New Acer Laptop

This post is a bit of a double recommendation really.

Firstly I just bought myself a new Acer TravelMate 3012WTMi laptop. Although I’m only just unpacking it now I’m already over the moon with it! It’s small and light enough so as to be portable but not so small as to be unusable.

When I decided to get a new laptop I knew what I had in mind. It had to be small and light as I do a lot of commuting and would be using it on trains. I also needed decent battery life and it had to have a PCMCIA slot for my 3G Datacard. I was amazed at just how many of the smaller laptops now come without the PCMCIA slot, most of them now shipping with just a CF slot.

Up until now I have been a big fan of Dell laptops, the previous 3 laptops I have had were Dell. I really liked the Dell X1 but this only has the CF card slot. No good to me!

I briefly looked at getting one of the new UMPC‘s and toyed with the idea of the Samsung Q1 but the reviews of the UMPC platform in general have been pretty poor.

So a friend suggested looking at the Acer. Acer wasn’t really a brand I had considered for laptops before. I’ve had some Acer monitors which have been pretty good so I decided to check it out.

The specification of the 3012 was exactly what I was looking and more to boot. It’s powered by Intel’s new Core Duo processor and supported by 1Gb of RAM. The hards drive is a spacious 80Gb, more than enough for me. The screen is 12.1″ Widescreen with a res of 1280×800, again this is ideal for me. It also includes a 1.3 mega pixel webcam which is a nice addition. Finally it had the PCMCIA card slot that I desperatly needed.

So I shopped around for a while, getting prices, looking at the excellent reviews and decided that the Acer was the one for me.

This is where we come to my second recommendation. A friend told me about a new company called expedIT that he had used recently. So I gave them a call and asked them for a price for the Acer model I wanted. The guy that I spoke to there said that Acer wasn’t a brand that they stocked but that he would see if he could get a price for me.

About 15 minutes later the guy called me back and gave me a quote. It was the same as the best price that I had seen on the web but what made me buy it from them, other than that they had been recommended to me, was that they actually took the time to find out about the product that I had enquired about and had come back to me so quickly with the price. What’s more they were able to promise the delivery within two days. Sold!

As promised the laptop arrived yesterday and I’m just getting to play with it now. I’ll probably follow up later.

Matt

[Technorati tag(s): Acer, laptop, TavelMate, Computing, technology]