Acer TravelMate 734TL
Price: AU$5,999.
Company: Acer Computers
Ph: 02 8762 3000; Fax: 02 9764 2368
www.acer.com.au
Acer has always made excellent notebooks. The Acer TravelMate 734TL is nothing less than an excellent all-round notebook. The Acer did not set any world records in the speed stakes, but is still zippy enough to do any tasks you may be doing on the road. The Acer shipped with only 64MB of RAM. We installed some extra RAM from another notebook to make it easier to compare test results with the other notebooks.
That said, the Acer performed quite poorly with only 64MB of RAM. Even with 128MB of RAM the Acer still was the slowest notebook in our Winstone tests. The Acer shipped with an Intel Pentium III 600MHz processor. This gave it less power than any of the other notebooks and it had a hard time keeping up. Where it was absolutely heads above the rest was Battery Mark. The Acer battery lasted for 4 hours and 42 minutes. No other notebook in our test went past four hours and only two other notebooks made it past three hours.
The Acer case is attractive and appears quite solid. The protection to the rear of the TFT was very good. After taking a closer look at the rear panel we realised that there was a pair of speakers mounted to the back of panel. We unscrewed three screws to lift open a panel that covered the two speakers. We also thought the sound would not be very clean since the speakers are firing from the rear of the panel, and we thought if you had the panel up against a wall the sound might suffer. Certainly when we tried this, the sound was a little muddy. But in all other conditions it was quite goodâ€"very loud and mellow.
The Acer has a pair of SO-DIMM slots located under a cover in the base; one was occupied by a 64MB SO-DIMM. A single screw removes the IBM hard drive. The hard drive was in an unusual location: it slides out from the front of the notebook. The DVD drive and battery are also easy to remove from the base of the notebook.
The keyboard is very well laid out; all the keys are quite large, except for the function keys. Travel and feedback was good, but the keyboard bounces slightly when typing. Overall feel, however is still above average. The touchpad is pretty typical and the buttons are quite small. There are three accompanying buttons that are sensibly located and have a reasonable amount of travel.
The quality of the display was above average and there was little to no rippling on the display when we applied some pressure to the back of the panel. The Acer was the least expensive of the name brand notebooks. At $5,999 it offers excellent value and it would probably still be the least expensive name brand notebook if you decided to upgrade the processor to a Pentium III 700. If you happen to have some problems with your Acer notebook you can take your Acer into one of the service dealers, where they guarantee they will have your notebook repaired in two hours.
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