Acer "Travel mate" 2501 XC - comparison to ThinkPad A31...

[A31]

I've just "tried" to do up an old Acer travel mate 2501 XC for a customer... it had one major problem however - the system was corrupt (file hal.dll missing or corrupt). Now in order to fix this you can do two things - 1) Reinstall XP / the OS, 2) Use the recovery disks. The customer had only given us the actual laptop and the AC adapter (the brick was about twice the size as the brick I use on the A31!!), and no recovery disk, so we couldn't do option 2. OK, reinstall XP then, but we thought it may be a HDD fault, so we didn't do that either. Instead, what we died (or "tried to do") was use one of the 2.5" HDD's I had upstairs, the particular one we were using was the HDD that was in my R40 before it died. So we were going to sort this by swapping HDD's over.

I bought the 40GB hard disk downstairs to where the Acer 2501 XC laptop was and look EVERYWHERE for where the hard disk was located. Looked under all the covers but could only find things like RAM modules, bluetooth radios etc, but then I removed the battery in the Acer and we found the drive. The drive (which according to a sticker on the front of the laptop was a 40GB) was in almost like a box sort of thing, a caddy that covered the top and bottom of the drive. It had a little bit of plastic that you pulled and the hard drive would appartnetly come out...hmm - no. We tried ALL the screws on the bottom of the case and it was still wedged in!! Wouldn't budge at all. In the end we left it and I think on Monday it's going to have to go back to the customer and we'll ask him for the recovery disc!! UNLESS, we can find a "manual" on how to remove the HDD...

I think once we'd finished I said "why didn't this guy just buy a ThinkPad?" as obviously i've just spent the last 2 months or so taking my A31 apart. The HDD in my A31 is located in a MUCH better place than the HDD on the Acer (mine is located under the PCMCIA slots, his is located very close to the battery!). But if you're like me, and you don't use your battery very often at all in the laptop, and your hard drive is located close to the battery, that could be slightly dangerous, if you were to accidently drop the laptop without the battery inserted you could damage the HDD.

...so here's my conclusion:
ThinkPads are EASIER to repair and they are just "better!". Also, on my Thinkpad, i don't have any rec. CDs as its a hidden partition on my hard drive, but on this Acer, it dosent have a hidden partition of any sort.
But bear in mind that this laptop may well be brilliant, I dont know as wouldnt boot, it's just I personally like Thinkpads - and I'm sure many of you on here do as well! (looked really ugly as well and keyboard felt a bit cheap, and where's the TrackPoint?)

[emeraldgirl08]

I agree with you on this! My brother bought a parts Acer 3680-2682. I was thinking that he'd have an easy time working on it however- I saw him struggle to take the thing apart and it was pretty painful! I was working on an R40 yesterday and showed him how easy it was to work on a Thinkpad

He did say that he liked the Thinkpads Trackpoint and had gotten used to it so I wouldn't be surprised to see a convert coming on board in the future