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Acer Timeline 4810T
A Core 2 Duo laptop with an eight-hour battery life? You bet
With the Acer running at full pelt we measured the temperature of the chassis as 25°C. The hot air that's expelled from the exhaust vent on the left side of the chassis is only slightly warmer - at 35°C - and the area of the bottom casing that is directly over the CPU also measures 35°C.
No netbook: the 4810T has an optical drive
That’s encouraging for two reasons. For one thing, you’ll have no trouble resting the Acer on your lap for extended periods and, for another, waste heat is a horrible drain on the battery. Acer tells us that it has developed the cooling system in conjunction with Intel that is called Laminar Wall Jet Cooling. The idea is that it carefully directs the cool air as it's drawn in through the inlet duct. Whatever, it seems to work.
Believe it or not, there's a card reader in there somewhere
The other big bits of hardware in the 4810T are the 320GB Hitachi Travelstar 5400rpm Sata hard drive - our sample had 500GB - a TSSTcorp TS-U633A dual-layer DVD writer, Atheros Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth and Intel HD audio.
Working our way round the chassis on the right side there is one USB port, the power plug, the Ethernet port and the optical drive. There’s a card reader on the front, and along the left side you get two more USB ports, 3.5mm headset jacks, and VGA and HDMI graphics outputs.
It's a little too easy to hit the HDMI port with a USB connector
The layout of the laptop isn’t bad but it does have a few annoyances. For instance, we tried to plug a USB mouse into the HDMI port on more than one occasion as the two ports are right next to each other. Then there’s the DVD drive eject button, which mirrors the position of the Power button - we found it was all too easy to press the wrong button when we wanted to turn on the laptop.