Pleasant, affordable Ultrabook with few weaknesses

The Acer Aspire M3 TimelineU is in the entry-level model 581T-32364G34Mnkk an especially favorable representative of "ultrabooks" as the genre defined by Intel's. Compared to normal notebooks of the same price range, the device is thinner and lighter, bringing Ultrabook features like an SSD accelerated idle status. Therefore you have to make certain compromises in the connection and expansion options, as well as the computing power.

Appearance, processing and use

The device comes in an unspectacular emphasizes flat carton, the self besides PSU only contains a quick start guide and a microfiber cloth to clean the screen other than the M3.

The design is simple in black and gray, with straight lines, overall very discreet. Design is, of course, always a matter of taste, I find this in any case quite succeeded. Despite partial use of aluminum plastic dominates the overall visual impression. The workmanship is alright but adequate and the price range. The matt plastic surfaces of the palm rest, keyboard and display frame are robust and resistant to fingerprints. The same applies to the also matte black aluminum surface of the housing cover. The case is sufficiently stiff and holds good.

The power button is mounted on the front of the chassis (when the flip is closed disables display). There are only two LEDs to signal the operating and charge status. A Hard disk drive activity is missing, which I find a bit irritating. Another small LED design would certainly do no harm.

Otherwise, I fail to see why Acer has shifted all the interfaces on the back (even the headphone port!), Because the case is not so flat that you would have had no room for it on the sides. So on the right side is not a single interface (at least one opening for a normal Kensington lock) and on the left next to the DVD drive, the SD card slot. At least one of the USB ports would have to place more accessible.

The keyboard I find succeeded in every respect. She looks good, the keys are arranged sensibly and have a non-slip surface. The attack is pleasant, nothing rattles or bends by itself.

The very large touchpad has a pleasant, slightly rough surface. On the right side there is a scroll area is not marked, and the two keys are seamlessly integrated, so that the pad is optically extremely inconspicuous. Due to its size, however, misses you at first occasion when the position of the key, ie pressing the wrong place.

Mediocre is the reflective screen. It provides an adequate, but not outstanding brightness and a balanced, but unfortunately somewhat weak color reproduction and quite dull contrasts. After all, the lighting is uniform. The display is a TN panel-typically only vertically absolutely vertical viewing angles well. The lateral viewing angle dependence is but acceptable, so you may well even sit in twos or threes on the device.

The sound quality of the built-in speaker is decent for a notebook - they sound relatively tired, even if a little dull.

Inner values ​​and performance

Built in the variant 32364G34Mnkk power-saving CPU Core i3 2367M is at the lower end of the current Core-i processors (clocked with only 1.4 GHz, no Turbo Boost). During short test with my M3 SuperPI needed about 27 seconds for a million jobs. So about one-third of the processor is about half as fast as a Core i5 2450M, which can be found in many non-Ultrabooks the same price range, and slower than a Core i5 2467M, as the in expensive M3 variants or in the basic version Aspire S3 can be found.

Nevertheless, the device for smooth working of course is always fast enough. Sheer CPU power is also not the specialty of Ultrabooks.

The integrated graphics unit (GPU) Intel HD 3000 is wonderfully suited for media playback and virtually all major video formats supported by hardware (DXVA) and play flawless. For games with sophisticated graphics it is but very limited. On most reasonably current titles graphic details must be significantly reduced in order to obtain a fluid display. In addition, the graphics quality (probably because not all mature drivers) in some games worse than the dedicated graphics chips from nVidia or AMD. Antialiasing you need for performance reasons anyway usually disable, but it also often leads to errors in the representation example of writings.

The fan control responds promptly to each load increase, and this is quite coarse graded. In stationary desktop fan is barely audible, but turns even at low load, so even with normal office or internet use, clearly on. If CPU or GPU full load the noise is even stronger. However, it remains uniform and well tolerable by the tone ago. In particular, it is accompanied by any high-frequency whistle.

The hard drive produces idle only a faint noise and when accessing a also slight tickers.

With maximum screen brightness, wireless active and low to very low load the battery lasts about five to six hours of HD video playback just over three hours. When CPU full load and maximum brightness after about two and a half hours it's over. Neither the body nor the air flow at the fan outlet are much more than lukewarm. The CPU reached in my experiments even after a longer full load a maximum temperature of only 56 ° C (measured at about 22 ° C room temperature).

The highly compact power supply (95x50x25mm, takes up less space than the accompanying cable) has no power LED and is due to the relatively low energy consumption at the "small" M3 even under load not extremely warm.

Data transfer via USB 3.0 on an external hard drive would not work despite driver update (the latest drivers from Intel) - the contact with the plate always went after a few seconds to a few minutes lost. Of course I can not rule out that the problem is on my external disk controller. On other laptops it certainly works well via USB 3.0.

The wireless internet service is decent and is on the usual level for notebooks.

From built-in memory (2 GB DDR3-1333 twice) is a module soldered firmly, a replaceable. The store is operated by dual channel.

Take advantage of additional SSD

The addition to the hard drive (here: 320GB, Hitachi Travelstar Z5K320, HTS543232A7A384) existing small SSD is provided with its 20GB capacity only as temporary storage. In contrast to the Aspire S3 but it is set up not only as a fast data warehouse for hibernation, but split from the factory into two partitions, the first of which (4 MiB) is configured as a hibernation partition, the second (14.64 GIB) but as hard drives cache, which can speed up repeated access to files greatly.

In fact, the SSD enables eg a Windows start in about 16 seconds from pressing the power button until the welcome screen and about 24 seconds until the desktop. Very nice.

The transition to Standby ("Power Save" = suspend to RAM = S3) is quite fast, in about 6-7 seconds. Waking works at M3 mostly in about half the time, often even within the advertised Acer 1.5 seconds.

Controlling under Windows the "hibernation" at (= Hibernation Suspend to Disk = S4), take up to a complete shutdown, depending on the operating mode for about 20 seconds. Waking takes from pressing the power button until the login screen similar length. Apparently here the SSD is not used (there is also a file hiberfil.sys on the system partition). Therefore, you can switch this hibernation most equal entirely on ("prompt" cmd Run as Administrator, powercfg / hibernate off).

With the pre-installed "Intel Rapid Start Technology" (iRST) the device can namely standby (S3) after 90 minutes automatically into deep sleep pass (S4), the main memory content is transferred as a buffer in the SSD. Waking up can no longer be then although by opening trigger (ie, you have to press the power button), but the process takes only a few seconds. I find that very convenient because you have to worry about how much time will pass until the next meeting.

The surface of the IRST configuration program (C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Intel \ irstrt \ RapidStartConfig.exe) the way you can make it visible via registry (HKLM \ SOFTWARE \ Wow6432Node \ Intel \ irstrt \ Parameters \ InvisibleMode to 0), but Unfortunately, changes to the settings are overwritten by no later than the next S4 state. After 90 minutes, a sensible default.

Windows installation

As usual, unfortunately, a lot of unnecessary software is preinstalled on the TimelineU M3. Due to the special configuration with SSD cache but I have not made any new installation (which would be the cleanest), but only the coarsest ballast uninstalled. That went smoothly.

Since there is no recovery media are included, you should promptly burn in "Acer eRecovery Management" recovery DVDs. For four blank DVDs and several hours are needed. For simplicity, you should use the opportunity to create an additional DVD with installation files for drivers and applications. Tip: Instead of burning DVDs, you can install the demo version of "Phantom Drive" a virtual burner, which then immediately created the restore DVDs as ISO images, which also is much faster.

Conclusion

The Acer Aspire M3 TimelineU (here in the "smallest" version with Core i3 and without nVidia graphics) is a pleasant notebook, with the liquid and can ergonomically work for me. It is relatively compact, lightweight and has a simple but elegant design.

Compared to other notebooks of the same size and price range you have to give up a piece of CPU power and possibly gaming suitable graphics, but receives the accelerating SSD Caching, and especially at low load good battery life.

Those looking for a lively all-round laptop, but rarely sheer CPU power needed with the "smallest" M3, make no mistake. A deficit is, in my view the most mediocre display. Slight point deduction, there is also the unfavorable positioning of the ports, as well as (in my case) hooking USB 3.0 port.

Otherwise the true value for money. Overall I give therefore a buy rating and four stars ****.