Buying a used Acer Timeline

October 26, 2011 5:37 AM

Considering buying a used Acer Timeline as a Linux-powered workhorse -- can you help me make the call?

My current "laptop" is a venerable but very tired Eee, and I'm looking for something with a little more muscle and a little more display real estate. I want something with long battery life, a decent amount of RAM, and if at all possible a matte display. After scouring my university's internal web listings, I think I've found the kind of laptop I'm looking for: a 1.5-year-old Acer Timeline (AS4810TZ-4696) with 8 GB of RAM, a 1.3Ghz Intel U2700 low power consumption CPU, and a 14" (1366 x 768) display.

My questions: will installing Debian (my preferred OS) on this system pose any challenges?

Will the CPU be underpowered, or will I not really notice because of (a) the decent amount of RAM and (b) the most demanding things I'll be asking of it are TeX typesetting and running GNOME 3?

What's the build quality on these things?

Finally, the lister's asking price is $300 -- would $250 be a fair initial offer? $225? Or am I out of my mind?

Many thanks!

posted by a small part of the world to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: I have an Acer Aspire 1410. It has a 1.2 Ghz dual core processor with 4GB of ram, and an 11.6" screen with 1366x768 resolution. I have Win 7 pro on it, along with the latest Ubuntu and Linux Mint distros on it. I mention my netbook because although it isn't from the Timeline model line many of its specs closely approximate a few of those models, at least from a year and change ago. It works well with all of the OSs I have on there, and not surprizingly it is faster with the linux OSs. The bottleneck you'll see with any OS now is with having a mechanical hard drive vs an SSD. I intend on putting one in this as funds become available, and if it does half as well as the one I put in my Vaio F series (intel core i7, 8GB ram) I'll be tickled to death. I've found that 7 out of 10 times with my 1410 the slowdown is directly attributable to everything waiting for the absurdly slow 5400 rpm HD to catch up. The other times I'm running so much stuff at once i'm not surprised the computer stumbles a bit. The dual core celeron, while not a powerhouse, definitely helps reduce how long you wait for something to get done vs a single core processor-at least at this price point.

Generally any distro of Linux you use will be quite a bit quicker than Windows 7. Even though it has come a long way "light and efficient" are never words that spring to mind while using it. Even the big linux distros I mentioned above, which are by no means small installs, run rings around Win7, and sometimes OSX. You could always consider a smaller distro like Damn Small linux or Slitaz or Crunchbang for a very small install with a minimum of resources used.

I have to say that my netbook sold for $400 18 months ago; I don't know if i would pay 300 for a used rig. To be fair, the Timeline series had a very nice look (but upon holding mine and a timeline 1810 didn't see any difference in quality of materials or screen), and was known for stellar battery life, but my 1410 only stopped getting more than 4.5 hours + after a year of almost daily charge/discharge cycles of the battery. Also you will probably lose some battery life when switching to linux from Win7. I typically see about a 10% reduction.

I would look for a new dual core aspire. I bet you'll find one for only a bit more than this person is asking for his 18 month old Timeline.
posted by chosemerveilleux at 9:53 AM on October 26, 2011

Response by poster: I appreciate the detailed response, chosemerveilleux. The points about HDD speed and the number of CPU cores being bottlenecks are well-taken. As it turned out, it was a single-core CPU and the HDD was 5400 rpm, both of which were too slow -- especially for the asking price of $300, which the seller was not willing to budge on. So I passed -- and was well-informed in so doing. Thanks!
posted by a small part of the world at 12:15 PM on October 26, 2011