Review of Acer TravelMate 2413 WLMi
The product is a laptop with the specifications1.5 GHz Celeron Mobile processor, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB harddisk, 15.4″ WXGA screen and wireless LAN.
When starting the computer for the first time, I only had to provide a small amount of information before it was ready. Then a program started, that helped me burn a rescue-DVD, so I would be able to reetablish the original software package. The process gave me some trouble: The first attempt failed and the second was corrupt, but Acer Support send me a working set they had made. It took 14 days, but such problems are hopefully rare. I used high quallity Verbatim DVD’s, that have always worked perfectly.
Note that the monitor is not in true 16:9 format as in “wide screen” (16/9 = 1.78) but 1280×800 (that is 1.60), so you will still get black bars when playing DVD’s. But not as large bars as on a normal 4:3-monitor.
One thing I can’t get is why there is plenty of space to make a huge keyboard on the laptop, but still they have used one of these smal sizes that could fit a notebook with a 12″ monitor. My old 14″ IBM laptop has a larger keyboard! I’m a programmer, so the ultra tiny arrow keys, function keys (F1-F12) and ESC are a pain to use. Actually I chose the laptop for the keyboard: It is lightly curved, and a bit more ergonomic than a normal laptop keyboard. I really like the idear of making a more ergonomic keyboard for a laptop, and I will absolutely prefer a semi-ergonic keyboard to a normal one in the future.
Besides that, the laptop have worked perfectly well for a couple of months. I can clearly reccomend it for non-programmers. Programmers, and other prople that use the special keys, should stay away from it.
Final note: The laptop came preinstalled with the operating system from Microsoft: I don’t like that, so I installed Linux. I chose the Open SuSE 10.0 distribution, and it worked almost perfectly. My only problem, with regard to the laptop is, that that the wireless network card don’t work unless a separate driver is installed. I haven’t tried to get it to work, because I don’t use it.
Linux driver note: If you need the graphics driver, you can get it from http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=1764 . Thanks to Intel for making an official Linux driver for the graphics card!