I got one of these late last year, to replace an aging (but much beloved) piece of Dell-provided lump of iron (trust me, they’re heavy things to haul about).
The Acer is a fine computer, but there are a couple of aspects to it which, had I known about them beforehand, would have discouraged me from choosing it ahead of, say, another Dell:
- Firstly, although it is fitted with a Core 2 Duo processor, the configured BIOS – as of the present version (1.3517) – prevents the system from supporting hardware-accelerated virtualization (which Intel market as “Intel® Virtualization Technology“), no matter what others may claim.
- Sound quality from the speakers is actually worse than that from the Dell it replaced.
- Sometimes, the case rattles ever-so-slightly when I’m typing. This is very annoying, but, when the case doesn’t rattle when I’m typing, the curved keyboard is very nice to type on.
To be fair to the Acer, it comes equipped with an integrated microphone, which, a woman from Dell told me, the Precision M65 does not; at the time, when one’s choices seemed otherwise equivalent, this was almost enough to swing it for the Travelmate, since I use Skype quite a bit.
Flashbang Science
Waveson
Did you ever manage to get he IVT working on the laptop? I have the same laptop and I am trying to get it up and running.
Hi Martin,
No, I never got it to work; Acer have not, to my knowledge, released an updated BIOS which would allow us to activate the feature.
I was in touch with them in February, and the response was: “I’m afraid if there is not [an] option in the BIOS to enable/disable VT then [you’re] stuck. It may be that a future BIOS updates allows for the change but it is unlikely.”
Quite.