Acer TravelMate 256-M
The Acer TravelMate 256-M is a no-nonsense 15in laptop aimed at business users. It may be low in frills, but it packs the essentials, and costs under £500.
To earn its keep as a business tool, a laptop needs to have a certain durability, and here the TravelMate feels as though its up to the job. The chassis is tough black plastic lid back and top deck – smooth and fingerprint wipeable – and a matt textured plastic underside. There’s no give in the body, although the lid/display assembly flexes a little when twisted.
Crucially there’s practically no bending across the top deck and wrist-rest area, giving a firm foundation to mount the excellent keyboard. This has rough textured key tops, likely to polish smooth after use, but when new is easy to work with, helped by the smooth, consistent action of the mediumtravel Scrabble-tile keys, with number keypad to the right.
There’s no complaint with the buttonless trackpad either, which is unusually easy to steer accurately for a budget laptop. We did find that cursor speed was too slow though, even with Windows and Synaptics adjustments set to maximum.
On the left side are two video ports, HDMI and VGA, plus gigabit ethernet, one USB 3.0 and a 3.5mm headset jack. Over on the right are two more USB, only USB 2.0 spec though, the DC power inlet, and an increasingly rare sight on any computer – a DVD drive. This Matshita multi-format optical drive can read and write to various discs, including dual-layer and DVD-RAM.
From below you can easily remove the 55Wh lithium-ion battery, even if the usual trapdoors to access memory and hard disk are absent. The TravelMate 256-M is fitted with 4GB of memory and a 500GB hard disk, and these should be upgradable after removing the entire bottom plate.
Performance
Our sample of TravelMate had a 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-4210U dualcore processor. It includes Hyper Threading Technology to work like a quad-core, and Turbo Boost up to 2.7GHz; although we found some online retailers selling under the same product code with the previous Core i5-4200U processor clocked at 1.6GHz. We suspect in actual use there will be little appreciable difference in performance.
Geekbench 3 scored the processor and memory with 2517 points running single-core, and 4863 points for multi-core mode. The professional Cinebench 15 test returned similar decent results of 104- and 241 points, well below those of a professional workstation notebook but suggesting ample raw power for crunching through office programs and some creative media work. In the OpenGL rendering test, the Acer average just under 21fps.
PCMark 7 scored the Acer with 2443 points, and PCMark 8’s various sub-tests also gave middle-of-the road results: the Home Conventional test showed 2159 points, rising to 2229 when accelerated by the Intel chip’s integrated graphics processor. The Work section showed clear advantages to using OpenCLoptimised programs though, rising from 2692- to 3305 points. These results were compromised by the relatively slow storage technology, since PCMark gives an all-round system speed check that also evaluates drive speed.
Turning to the hard disk, Acer has installed the traditional 2.5in SATA hard disk, a Seagate drive spinning at 5400rpm. While slow, you do at least get the advantage of a sizable volume to store data. In our tests, it could read and write at around 108MB/s, falling to 22- and 41MB/s with 512kB files; and then tumbling to just 0.41- and 0.76MB/s with small 4kB random files. This will be the main reason why Windows feels more sluggish than normal.
As a quick measure of the capability of the Intel HD Graphics 4400, we tested with Batman: Arkham City, where the TravelMate averaged just 22fps at its native low 1366x768-pixel resolution and Medium detail. By dropping resolution to 1280x720 and detail to Low, it mustered an almost playable 28fps, albeit with 15fps minimum.
Display quality is one area where laptop makers cut corners, and the TravelMate P2 was no exception. It takes a budget twisted-nematic (TN) technology screen, with poor viewing angles, restricted colour gamut and low contrast ratio. Tilting the screen back a few degrees beyond optimum and the image soon disappears into a dark mess.
Contrast ratio was a low 90:1, leading to milky colours and lightgrey blacks, while colour gamut incorporated just 65 percent of the basic sRGB colour space. Colour accuracy measured 2.28 Delta E, where better quality screens hit 1.0 or less deviation. That said, the display was usable enough and benefited from calibration to bring its colours out of the washed-out blue to slightly more natural tones.
Such basic low-res TN panels are more frugal in power requirements, and helped the TravelMate last for a useful eight hours 26 minutes in our standard looped-video rundown test. At 2.3kg, the Acer is not a featherweight but combined with the good battery life it should make a much better travelling tool than other short-lived laptops.
Verdict
The Acer gets all the basics right, with decent battery life, good performance and a sturdy, robust feeling chassis.