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Acer Timeline 4810T

A Core 2 Duo laptop with an eight-hour battery life? You bet

Review Acer says its new series of Timeline laptops offer a battery life up to eight hours. That’s a mighty bold claim so we’re putting the Aspire Timeline 4810T under the microscope to see whether it’s a piece of engineering genius or PR puff.

Acer Timeline 4810T

Acer's Timeline 4810T: titanic battery life?

There are three sizes of chassis in the Timeline series, with two models at each size offering a choice of processors. In each case, the cheaper version has a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Solo U3500 processor while the more expensive model has the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo U9400 and an extra cell in the battery.

The 13.3in model weighs 1.6kg and has no optical drive. It's priced at £550 and £700, depending on your choice of CPU.

The larger 14.1in and 15.6in models each have a dual-layer DVD writer. The 14.1in version weighs 2kg and costs either £550 or £750, while the 15.6in big boy weighs 2.4kg and costs £580 or £800.

To put it another way, the single-core processor models cost £550, £550 or £580 so the choice of chassis size makes no difference. The dual-cores cost £700, £750 and £800 so each step in chassis size costs £50, which leads us to the thought that the extra cost results from the increase in the number of cells in the battery.

Acer_Timeline_01

One design, three screen sizes

During our testing we found that we could run continuous loops of PCMark05 for 3h 59m. This is a harsh test as it keeps the laptop working hard and we're confident that you can double the time achieved to reflect real-word battery life. This means that the Timeline 4810T can truly run for a complete working day on a single battery charge, or a flight across the Pacific.

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