Acer TravelMate 3045WTMi - an Ultra-Light Stylish Notebook

Acer is performing quite well in the notebook PC market. Currently, it has the largest share of the Russian market, and it is also faring well worldwide. Much of Acer's success can be attributed to its powerful marketing efforts and unique pricing. Acer manages to win a large share of the laptop market largely by selling uber-cheap notebook models that feature everything necessary for work.

This ultra-portable notebook model we are reviewing today that comes with a wide 12" display, however, is not very cheap. It is a business model that comes at a business price. The ultra-portable class of notebook PCs is gradually becoming more popular, as there appears to be more business users who need notebooks for constant short-term trips, where a small notebook and light weight play an important role. Although this class of notebook PCs is growing, the sales volume of ultra-portable notebooks is still far from the sales of regular notebook classes.

Acer 3045WTMi

This is how the manufacturer describes the Travelmate 3040 series:

The Acer TravelMate 3040 is designed in alignment with Acer's ambition to balance high-performance ultraportability and superior efficiency by creating the ultimate lightweight notebook for highly-mobile business professionals. Weighing just around 1.5kgs and featuring the latest 64bit Intel Centrino 2 Duo Mobile Technology, the Acer TravelMate 3040 offers maximum productivity, superior unwired freedom and ultra-connectivity to drive your business mobility into the future.

As we can see, the company highlights the combination of ultra-portability and high performance.

Web site, tech support

Unfortunately, it is not possible to go from the model catalog page directly to technical support. You have to instead use the menu.

The first page of the tech support web site is devoted to the warranty. It says that the warranty is valid only if you have a warranty coupon. Otherwise, the warranty will be up to your retailer. This page describes warranty peculiarities for Acer Ferrari notebooks. All Travelmate models come with a two-year warranty. The international warranty is not described well, though. In addition, the website doesn't offer complete information on what you must do in the case that your notebook is broken.

The process of downloading drivers is not very good in our opinion. First you choose your notebook model in the list. On the next page, you choose the necessary driver from the drop-down menu. Then a window pops up with a download link. There are three links, one for XP Drivers, Vista Drivers, and Acer Utilities. The process seems easy enough, but the problem is it is difficult to tell whether you even need to download a new driver because no driver version is listed.

However, for advanced users direct FTP links to the drivers and utilities should cancel out the above inconveniences.

We should also mention that the bundle does not include a Recovery CD. A recovery image is stored on the hard drive, and the built-in utility suggests that you burn the image to a compact disc at startup. The company has started including an empty recordable compact disc into the bundle, this was users can create a recovery CD without having to buy a spindle of blanks CDs.

Acer Travelmate 3045WTMi Specifications

Bundle

The plain-looking box contains:

• Notebook
• Power Supply Unit
• Two batteries - half and full capacity
• Phone cable
• IEEE 1394 cable
• External optical drive
• a VoIP phone with a guide and CDs
• Guides