Software

The Acer TravelMate 371TCi comes with preinstalled software; two applications are the most interesting: Notebook Manager and Launch Manager. The Notebook Manager runs in Windows and displays the hardware configuration of the notebook, allows changing passwords, energy-consumption settings and the boot-up sequence. The Launch Manager is used to assign your favorite applications to the four quick-launch buttons. By default, the WLAN module is always on and the quick-launch buttons start up the Launch Manager (the user is supposed to assign his/her own favorite applications to these buttons), the default Internet browser and e-mail client.

The notebook is rather small, so its configuration implies the use of an external optical drive. That’s why the procedure of system restoration from the hard disk drive is a very helpful feature (there’s a hidden partition with system files on the HDD). If you want to roll the preinstalled software back to which it was when you bought the notebook, press F2 before turning the system on and turn on the Enable the Boot From D2D option in the Advanced page. Then get back to the main menu and press F10 to save your changes. After the reboot, the restoration process will start up automatically. That’s all – you don’t need to use an external optical drive or search for additional drivers.

Testing methodology and Benchmarks Results

We tested the Acer TravelMate 371TCi notebook with the preinstalled Microsoft Windows XP Professional and DirectX 9.0a. We disabled network and power-saving services and the screen-saver, turned off the audio subsystem and shut down antivirus software.

We ran our tests in two modes, with different power-consumption options. The notebook was attached to the wall outlet in the first mode (max performance); in the second mode it worked on its own accumulator (max battery life).

Benchmarks:

• Synthetic tests (SiSoftware Sandra 2004, PCMark 2004);
• Tests of performance in office and multimedia applications (Business Winstone 2004, Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004);
• Tests of performance in games (3DMark 2001 SE Pro, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003).

We also tested the minimal battery life time with the help of Battery Eater Pro 2.22.

The notebook did well in synthetic tests of SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and PCMark 2004. You may see the results below:

The TravelMate 371TCi slows down by 43-52% when working on its accumulator battery. The machine starts being thrifty about the system resources, affecting negatively the overall system performance as well as the speed of each of its components.