Acer Travelmate 3220 Review

Rating 9.5/10
Quick Facts
Distributed by: Acer Computer Pty Ltd.
Contact: www.acer.com.au
Price: $1050 (At time of purchase mid 2006)

Pros
-Graphics Card
-Outstrips most desktops of its era
-Wireless b/g
-Bluetooth
-Reasonably Priced
-Great Connectivity
-Compact (Although a behemoth compared the HP mininote )

Cons
-Slow Optical Drive
-Surface can scratch
-Screen is not as bright as other notebooks (Although is of acceptable brightness)
-4200rpm hard disk

Specifications
Processor: 2Ghz Pentium M
Ram: 2GB DDR2 533Mhz Dual Channel
Graphics: Dedicated ATi Radeon X700 64mb GDDR3 Memory
Display: 14.1” TFT at 1280×800 resolution
Hard Disk: 80GB Toshiba 4200rpm
Optical Drive: Dual Layer DVD Burner
Weight: ~2.5kg

The Acer Travelmate 3220 represents a great first laptop, it was low priced, reliable and can play games better than the average laptop and at $1050 in 2006 the Acer Travelmate represents an excellent deal and is well worth every cent of its purchase price.

Design
Upon first glance at the Acer 3220, the user is met with a stylish silver exterior, marked by the signature Acer folio design. Upon opening the lid, the user will observe the spacious 14.1” TFT screen, Acer have limited the overhanging plastic around the LCD to add to the devices compact status and to enhance the true sense of design evident throughout the notebook. The notebook features a curved ergonomic keyboard, which may take some getting used to, especially for users who haven’t used a notebook keyboard before. The notebook features a responsive touchpad, with a four way scroll button beneath. The notebook also features several quick launch keys to enable the user the undertake a variety of their day to day tasks relatively quickly. The only issue with the design is that the touchpad is easily bumped whilst typing sending the cursor jumping up or down a few lines, however this fault occurs in almost all notebooks, so is really not a major drawback, especially with the ability to turn the touchpad off with a simple function key. Overall the Acer Travelmate supports several intuitive and inspiring design features.

Portability
The sparse majority of notebook users are highly concerned with the portability of a notebook. The Acer 3220 due to its almost ideal mix of size and performance is an ideal modest desktop replacement, and functions equally as well as a portable notebook. The 3220 performs well in terms of battery life, with everything cranked to max, with wireless and Bluetooth switched on the notebook manages to squeeze out just under three hours of battery life, but if the user is conservative and utilises the handy, bundled Acer ePower management software they can squeeze almost five hours out of the battery. Based on the inclusion of the 14.1” screen the notebook is relatively compact and would be well suited for any student, or mobile proffessional who wants a smaller laptop but doesn’t want to compromise on performance. The Acer Travelmate maintains a perfect blend of performance and portability, ultimately leading to a well finished and polished product.

Performance
Performance is at the forefront of any PC, and the Acer 3220 appears to be a quite mean package. The 2Ghz Pentium M Processor serves to provide a healthy powerhouse for the Travelmate 3220, with 2GB of Corsair RAM and only running the relatively conservative XP Pro this notebook powers through everyday tasks and handles intensive programs such as Photoshop CS3 with ease. The dedicated graphics card helps it power through even the most modern games such as Battlefield 2 and Dawn of War at the highest settings, with virtually no frame rate drop or lapse in performance. The only major bottleneck of the system is the lousy 4200rpm hard disk drive. In addition to its limited 80GB storage space (set up into two partitions in the factory, making it easier to dual boot straight away), the drive is extremely slow. Microsoft’s Disk Defragmenter takes almost 24hrs to complete just one partition! However if the slow hard disk bothers the user a larger and faster drive can be purchased for under $100. Despite the bottleneck caused by the relatively slow hard disk the Acer Travelmate is a major performer, and was and still is a true computing powerhouse.

Connectivity
The Acer 3220 features a wealth of Connectivity Options. It features three USB 2.0 ports, two located on the left and one on the rear. The notebook is wirelessly adept featuring both Bluetooth and Wireless b/g which are both easily accessed via two large switches on the front of the notebook. The laptop features a 5 in 1 card reader, enabling it to read memory cards from an absolute plethora of cameras and media devices, supporting Secure Digital (SD), MultiMediaCard (MMC), xD-Picture Card™ (XD), Memory Stick® (MS) and Memory Stick PRO™ (MS-Pro). The laptop features a Type II PCMCIA card slot, although foregoing a more modern express card slot, the PCMCIA card slot is functional and the uptake of the express card format is largely slow. The laptop features an IEEE 1394 firewire port adding further media functionality, particularly for those who dabble in video editing, which this laptop is more than capable of handling. The notebook features a Gigabit LAN port and a 56k Modem to facilitate internet and network connections. The notebook features an S-Video out and a VGA out, although lacking a DVI-out port, the notebook’s screen is largely adequate for everyday use and if necessary a VGA to DVI converter can be purchased if the user’s external monitor only features a DVI cable. The 3220 also features Acer’s trademark EasyDock port, however this is not an essential purchase as the notebook’s connectivity is largely facilitated by the connectors already available on the laptop. The laptop features Acer’s DVD supermulti drive allowing for quick burning and reading of DVDs and CDs. Intuitively Acer has located the audio output to the far left of the notebook facilitating the easy integration of external speakers into the notebook, the intuitive location of the audio output means that both headphones and external speakers are well catered for. Overall the Acer Travelmate supports a wealth of connectivity options facilitating a modern technological lifestyle.

Company Support
Acer only had to be dealt worth during the purchase of the computer and were prompt and helpful in organising pickup of the product from a local vendor. The only issue with the laptop has been an intermittent fault with the touchpad in which it locks up sometimes, however this is likely to be a problem with the touchpad driver or could simply be a loose connection; a reset instantly fixes this problem anyway. This problem however, has only occurred three or four times out of the many times this computer has been operated.

Comparison to Similar Product
Acer Travelmate 3220
vs.
Excel P4 Notebook

At the time of purchase of the notebook the Excel P4 was under deep consideration, with it’s slightly lower price and it’s grunty P4 processor, it represented a further tantalising notebook on the market.

The Excel P4 Notebook however proved to be largely inferior to the Acer Travelmate, the Pentium M CPU on the Travelmate in terms of raw power outstrips the comparison P4 processor. Although the Excel features a dedicated graphics card, it is an outdated Radeon 9600. The more modern graphics card of the Acer Travelmate ultimately puts it square in front of the Excel P4 laptop.

In terms of connectivity the Acer 3220 far outperforms the Excel P4. Despite the Excel’s four USB ports, the Travelmate features Bluetooth, b/g WLAN, Gigabit LAN, a Firewire port and a 5 in 1 card slot. The wealth of connectivity options on the Acer Travelmate ultimately facilitated its purchase over the Excel P4 Notebook.

The largest deciding factor between the two notebooks was portability. Despite the Excel P4’s inclusion of an 8-cell battery, the P4 processor ensured the battery life was limited to two hours, the considerably longer battery life of almost five hours, sported by the Acer 3220, ultimately won the Acer team the battle between the two notebooks, highlighting the numerous inferior qualities of Excel’s offering in their P4 notebook.

Benchmarks
Fresh Diagnose was utilised to obtain the following benchmarks, the Acer Travlemate 3220 was compared to a generic desktop PC sporting a 3.0GHz P4 processor, 512mb of DDR 3200 Ram, a 64mb NVidia GeForce4 graphics card, an 80gb Seagate 7200rpm SATA hard disk and a Samsung 52x CD-Rom Drive.

Processor:
The 2.0Ghz Pentium M processor of the 3220 produced benchmarks of 7,314MDIPS (Millions of Dhrystone Instructions Per Second), 4,980MWIPS (Million Whetstones Instructions Per Second) and a CPU index of 3,766.
Whilst the 3.0Ghz Pentium 4 processor produced scores of 6,571MDIPS, 3,115MWIPS and a CPU index of 2,048.

Memory:
The 2GB of Corsair DDR2 4200 Ram in the 3220 managed to supply scores of 95,109 in an integer assignment, 91,326 in a real assignment, 98,544 in a integer split and 98,517 in a real split.
Whilst the 512mb of DDR 3200 Ram managed 21,278 in the integer assignment, 21,720 in the real assignment, 80,138 in the integer split and 98,517 in the real split.

Graphics:
The Ati Radeon X700 64mb GDDR3 card managed to record a Random Pixel Draw of 2,166 KPixels/s, 1,961,000 Lines/s, 369,067 Circles/s, 384,074 Rectangles/s, 2,365,350 Char/s (texts), 122,986,560 KPixels/s (FloodFills), 134,553 KPixels/s (Draw).
Whilst the 64mb NVidia GeForce4 graphics card 633 KPixels/s, 93,000 Lines/s, 23,666 Circles/s, 88,995 Rectangles/s, 1,033,261 Char/s (texts), 1,102,720 KPixels/s (FloodFills), 44,816 KPixels/s (Draw).

Hard Disk:
The 80GB Toshiba 4200rpm hard disk of the 3220 managed to achieve a write speed of 14.91mb/s, a read speed of 17.71mb/s.
Whilst the 80gb Seagate 7200rpm SATA hard disk managed to achieve a write speed of 30.11mb/s and a read speed of 44.88mb/s

Conclusion
Despite the somewhat aged hardware of the Acer Travelmate 3220, the laptop proves to be a truly powerful computer and able is to keep up with all the latest applications and games that are thrown at it. Acer have intuitively blended a mixture of performance and portability to create an ultimately idealistic laptop, an epiphany of modern computing.

Personal Stories
1. I have been always the one to pull apart anything with a power cord and examine its inner workings; all electronics provide an insight in the intricacy of modern engineering. However the Travelmate 3220 was different. I surely couldn’t take a screwdriver to my precious laptop.

2. Whilst typing up this very review on my trusty Acer 3220, disaster struck, more so due to fault of mine than the computer. I was on the third last line of the review and I had to hit the “5” key, I accidentally slipped one key above on the F5 (refresh) disaster struck my several hours worth of reviewing gone, for the sake of Microsoft’s intrepid convenience. Sadly I had the start the review again from scratch. . This time however I made sure I typed it all on Microsoft, ensuring I hit Ctrl + S every few minutes to ensure against loss of the review. Let that be a lesson to all would be reviewers, entering a review, either write up in Microsoft Word, or keep right away from F5.