Product Listing

Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T - Time After Time

By Aloysius Low & Vijay Anand - 21 May 2009

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Life and Portability Index

Notebook Comparison Table
Specifications/Notebook Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T Toshiba Portege R600 HP Pavilion dv2
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo processor ULV SU 9400 (1.40GHz) with 3MB L2 cache Intel Core 2 Duo processor ULV SU 9400 (1.40GHz) with 3MB L2 cache AMD Athlon Neo-MV40 (1.6GHz) with 512KB L2 cache
Chipset Intel GS45 Intel GS45 AMD M690G
Memory 4GB DDR3 3GB DDR2 1 x 2GB DDR2
HDD 1 x 500GB SATA - 5400RPM 128GB SSD 1 x 320GB SATA - 5400RPM
Video Intel GMA 4500HD Intel GMA 4500HD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410

With a promised battery life up to 8 hours, we were very interested to see how much we could squeeze out of the notebook. This time around, we decided to run a 720p video clip looped on the hard drive in anticipation that several upcoming CULV notebooks may lack an optical drive. This way, we would have a comparable standard to test the other notebooks when they come our way.

Powering the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T is this slim looknig 6-cell battery that's rated at 11.1V and 5600mAH.

While it's not the claimed eight hours (which is based on extreme power saving measures), the Aspire Timeline still delivered an impressive result of 5.05 hours. If you're wondering how long it would have lasted running on our usual DVD video looping runs, it managed more than 4 hours, putting it in a similar playing level as the Toshiba Portege R600 (which also bears very similar hardware).

Power consumption for the Acer Timeline was also low at 12.31 watts and this was to be expected using the video clip looped on the hard drive versus a DVD run on an optical drive. If we were to base our calculations on the uptime from our DVD test run, these numbers would be a little higher but still slightly better than that of the Toshiba Portege R600 that we've previously reviewed. However, note that this lower figure is mostly due to the Timeline using its HDD as we did not test the ODD power consumption. Then again, these low scores are to be expected of course, given the power saving nature of this platform, and looks real good for consumers looking for notebooks with staying power.

For the Portability Index, the Aspire Timeline didn't fare too badly here considering its 1.9kg weight. Even if you were to recalculate the figures with the uptime figures using a DVD video run, it still would have managed decently with an index close to 1.10. We're guessing the lighter 13-inch version would probably fare even better since its quite similar to this 14-inch Timeline in most aspects. Against the AMD Yukon platform, the Timeline easily beats the dv2, though it still looses out against the feather light and portable Toshiba Portege R600.

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