by Galina Sudareva
06/28/2004 | 10:03 PM
The rapid expansion of computer and mobile technologies has led to portable PCs of small size and weight and generously endowed with wireless capabilities. Such notebooks are good performers, running office and multimedia applications as well as modern 3D games. They are indispensable little helpers and sometimes even substitutes to desktop PCs. This miniaturization trend has its shortcomings, though. The compact size doesn’t often allow for making such a notebook into a high-performance machine.
Still, there’s a hope that the situation may change in the future and the gap between mobile and stationary systems will diminish.
As for today, we would like to offer you a review of the Acer TravelMate 371TCi notebook – exactly the product outlined above with its small size (273x213x24mm), light weight (1.7kg) and rich wireless capabilities.
Small and compact notebooks easily draw our attention and this model is no exception. Its original design, light weight and small size work on the customer as bait. The plastic case of the TravelMate 371TCi is colored light-silver. Sliding the spring latch on the butt-end to the left and lifting the lid you can see some dark-gray color, too.
The 12.1” screen has a maximum resolution of 1024x768; it is bright, good at rendering colors and with rather wide viewing angles. You control its brightness with appropriate functional keys. The range of the screen brightness is rather small, but the minimum level allows reading text in complete darkness without any discomfort.
Along the bottom edge of the display there are indicators of the system status; they form a row of LEDs under appropriate symbols. They include:
You can’t see these LEDs when the lid is closed, so the WLAN, power and standby indicators are also duplicated on the outer surface of the lid (I think it would be even better if they had placed a battery charge indicator here, too).
Above the keyboard, in the center, there’s a round power on/off button and quick-launch buttons:
Two speakers are found closer to the base of the screen, while the integrated microphone is situated next to the touchpad.
The keyboard of the TravelMate 371TCi has full-sized keys (only the row of functional keys on top are small) and is made of black plastic. The letters on the keys are white, while the functional keys have the ordinary blue letters (their commands are available when you press and hold [Fn]). The cursor block of keys is inconvenient to use since the keys are small and have PgUp/Home and PgDn/End keys at the sides, which can be accidentally hit upon. There are also an integrated numeric pad and two Windows keys located like on the ordinary PC keyboard. The keyboard of the TravelMate 371TCi is overall a handy thing, save for the above-mentioned nuisances.
The touchpad is curious in this notebook: the sensor panel is oval, so its useful area is smaller. Besides the standard two buttons that merge into the frame around the control device (they replace the two mouse buttons), there’s also a four-positional oval-shaped joystick for vertical and horizontal scrolling.
At the butt-end of the notebook, we see a display latch, an IrDA port, and a card reader (SD, MMC and MS formats are supported).
These connectors are found at the left panel:
The LAN and modem connectors are hidden under a cover.
At the right side, there’s a USB port, a Kensington lock and vent holes.
The back side cannot boast an abundance of connectors; there’s only a connector for the external monitor, again under a rubber cover.
The bottom of the case contains the cover of the memory bay, a battery cell and vent holes.
The Acer TravelMate 371TCi comes accompanied with the following things: a small external power adapter, a phone cable, documentation, user manual, a booklet with the list of authorized Acer service centers, a set of drivers and utilities and discs for restoring the system.
You also get an external DVD/CD-RW drive with the notebook. The drive connects across an IEEE1394 port and receives power from the notebook’s accumulator batteries.
The Acer TravelMate 371TCi is based on the Centrino platform, featuring the i855GM chipset, an Intel Pentium M 1.4GHz processor (Banias core, 0.13-micron technology, 400MHz FSB and 1MB L2 cache). This configuration also boasts a Seagate ST94011A HDD (5400rpm spindle rotation speed, 2MB cache-buffer, 40GB capacity).
The system uses an integrated graphics subsystem with Dynamic Video Memory technology. The necessary amount of graphics memory (up to 64MB, according to Acer) is allocated dynamically from the main RAM. Curiously, the BIOS Setup contains an item that sets the amount of graphics memory to 16MB and you cannot change this value.
The TravelMate 371TCi also has two memory slots, both occupied by modules of PC2700 DDR SDRAM, 256MB each. According to Acer, the maximum supported memory amount is 2048MB. To reach the slots, you undo the screws at the sides of the special cover at the bottom of the case.
The integrated audio subsystem and the speakers give a voice to the computer, although a quiet one. It is enough for applications and games, but poor at reproducing music. Well, hi-fi music reproduction is not a responsibility of this notebook.
The external optical DVD/CD-RW combo drive you get with the notebook connects to the IEEE1394 port, burns CD-R and CD-RW media at 24x speed and reads DVDs and CDs at 8x and 24x speeds, respectively. By the way, this drive can get power from the notebook’s own battery, so you can use it on the run, too.
The compactness and small size of the TravelMate 371TCi suggest that you use it in the so-called field conditions and the Wi-Fi technology of the 802.11b standard is another point for that.
The power management system employed in the notebook keeps watching over your system and if you don’t use the input devices (I mean the mouse and the keyboard) as well as the hard drive and other peripherals for a while, they are stopped to save power. The power management system supports ACPI.
This model of the notebook uses a low-noise cooling system. Interestingly, the area below the keyboard was noticeably hot to the touch during work. We used an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of the surface of the TravelMate 371TCi when it was crunching through Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004:
The thorough list of the technical characteristics of the TravelMate 371TCi notebook follows below:
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.
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:
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.
I think it would be right to compare the results of the TravelMate 371TCi with those of another notebook from Acer, the Aspire 2001WLCi, we reviewed earlier. Unlike the TravelMate 371TCi with its positioning as a mobile and compact portable computer, the Acer Aspire 2001WLCi is a “desktop notebook”. This computer is also based around the Centrino technology, but with the Intel 82855PM chipset that supports 333MHz memory frequency (the Intel 855GM chipset of the TravelMate 371TCi can only clock the memory at 266MHz). The Aspire features an Intel Pentium M 1.4GHz processor (Banias core, 0.13-micron technology), too. The notebooks have different memory frequencies (266MHz in the TravelMate 371TCi against 333MHz in the Aspire 2001WLCi), hard disk drives (a 5400rpm 40GB Seagate ST94011A with 2MB cache against a 4200rpm 40GB Toshiba MK4025GAS with 8MB cache). The Aspire uses the RADEON MOBILITY 9200 as the graphics subsystem, so we’ll only compare the results of SiSoftware Sandra 2004 and Business Winstone 2004 tests.
SiSoftware Sandra 2004 produced close CPU performance ratings (fitting into the measurement error range), while the PRs of the memory and disk subsystems differ between the notebooks (the Aspire 2001WLCi has a higher memory clock rate, and the TravelMate 371TCi has a higher HDD spindle rotation speed). You can see the results in the following diagrams:
The TravelMate 371TCi uses a faster hard disk drive (5400rpm against 4200rpm), so the performance of its disk subsystem is 15% higher.
The results of Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests that emulate the standard Windows environment with office and multimedia applications running, are reassuring. The TravelMate 371TCi is about 3-4% faster than the Aspire 2001WLCi in Business Winstone 2004. The following table contains the results:
The diagram below shows the performance of the notebook in Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004:
3DMark 2001SE Pro will help us to estimate the performance of the notebook in games:
As you see, we had two test modes: 1024x768 resolution, 16-bit color, 16 bit Z-Buf, 16 bit Texture and 1024x768, 32 bit, Z-Buf: 24 bit, Texture: 32 bit. The numbers we obtained are rather low. The speed degenerates as soon as the notebook starts working on its own accumulator battery and you definitely cannot play modern DirectX 9.0-compatible games with any comfort. Well, the performance is low even when you plug the machine to a wall outlet – the low CPU and memory clock rates, 1.4GHz and 266MHz respectively, don’t allow reaching better results.
We benchmarked the TravelMate 371TCi in two popular games, Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2003, too:
We tested notebook in Quake 3 with two graphics quality presets:
You can play the first mode, but the second one is rather difficult for the notebook. The diagram follows:
It’s the same in Unreal Tournament 2003 (you can see the results in the table below). When feeding on the accumulator battery, the notebook gave out a slide-show of a game at a 63% smaller frames-per-second rate.
We used Battery Eater Pro 2.22 to measure the battery life of the Acer TravelMate 371TCi computer. We run the test at the maximum and minimum screen brightness levels. We also used several test modes:
When the screen brightness was the maximum, the time of battery life is a little below 3 hours in the classic mode, a little over 4 hours in the reader’s mode, and below 2 hours in the idle mode. Reducing the screen brightness to the minimum, we extended the battery life by:
These are very good timings for a notebook of this class, positioned as a portable and mobile device for frequent use in “field conditions”. There’s no sense in diminishing the screen brightness to the minimum in the battery life test during DVD playback, as I think there are few people who like watching movies on a dark (if not completely black) display.
Our analysis and extensive testing of the Acer TravelMate 371TCi produced the following results: this notebook delivers good performance (very good for its size) and features excellent design and ergonomics, convenient placement of ports and connectors. With its compact dimensions and light weight, this portable computer is true to its purpose – to serve not only at home or office, but also in the open, in field conditions. It does this job well thanks to its long-lasting battery.
Overall, the Acer TravelMate 371TCi is going to make a good buy for people who live on the run, traveling this world for leisure or on business.