Review: Acer Ferrari 4005 and 8104. Power and style

As with most of my reviews, I am not going to give you a run-down of all the features and specs of the Acer Ferrari 4005 and 8104, as that's all available on Acer's website and any number of reviews on Epinions. Instead, I'm going to cut to the chase and tell you what's good and bad about these machines and why you may or may not want one.

First up, bear in mind that the Ferrari 4005 is an Acer Travelmate 8104 in wolf's clothing. They are the same machine, apart from the fact that the Travelmate has a silver exterior and Intel CPU as against the Ferrari's AMD chip and stunning black and red livery with carbon fibre inlays. In addition, Acer have cranked up the clock speed on the Graphics Processing Unit of the Ferrari a little, so it does have marginally quicker video than the 8104. That would be appealing if you are a game player.

As for the AMD v Intel debate, it's mostly stuff and nonsense. Don't believe anyone who tries to make a very strong argument for one over the other. You'll see very little difference in performance. Also, the argument that 64 bit is better because it's the way of the future is also fairly shallow. Very few of your applications are available in 64-bit now, so even with the Ferrari you'll be using 32-bit Windows and 32-bit apps. When Longhorn comes out to replace Windows XP, which may still be more than a year away, you'll still need to upgrade all your applications at considerable expense, and all your drivers, and by the time everything is stable and available under a 64-bit operating system you may well be looking at 3 years down the track. By that time your machine will be 3.5 years old in its technology and you'll be looking to get a newer, faster machine anyway. So it's a non-issue in my book.

Apart from that the 8104 and 4005 are the same. Same excellent build quality, great screen, shape, weight, features and form factor. Same curved keyboard which you may dislike at first but will get used to. Same tendency to run quite warm and have the cooling fan spinning all the time. Same fairly clunky trackpad, which you probably won't use because a mouse is far better--except for that stylish but skippy bluetooth one which Acer ship with the Ferrari--it's a gimmick, and you'll put it away in frustration. In fact, all bluetooth mice I have used are frustrating at the end of the day.

Their inherent similarities mean that both the Ferrari 4005 and Travelmate are great machines. Fast, good graphics, great screens and plenty of power for the reasonable weight. They don't have CrystalBright type screens with their ironically-named 'anti-reflection coatings', which means they are clearly not as good for watching DVDs, although not bad, and clearly vastly better for using as a computer, which is after all, what they are for. I don't get how anyone would think that a shiny screen is an improvement for working on documents and spreadsheets in the differing lighting conditions under which a laptop is often used.

So what are the differences, and why would you choose one over the other or over competing models from other manufacturers? To the last question first--there are not that many competing models. As far as I can tell, Sony, Asus and Toshiba's models in the same price range are less powerful, IBM's are much more expensive, and Dell's heavier. That leaves the likable HP Compaq nx8220 which has better sound and is slightly smaller, but suffers from very poor screen brightness and uneven backlight in the one I've seen--bad enough to instantly take it out of the running.

So it's Acer v Acer up the final straight. The Ferrari wins on looks and sex appeal, but loses a little on the fact that you pay a premium for that. The Travelmate 8100 series gains on the fact that there are now faster models available (2.26 Gig 8106 for example) but loses again on the slightly slower video clock speed.

So it's pretty even coming up to the finish line, until the Ferrari hits its fatal flaw, one that I have not seen mentioned in any other review (though apologies to anyone who has covered it). The keyboard surround/palm rest of the Ferrari is covered in this lovely looking matte rubber finish. Unfortunately, I found it felt absolutely awful under my palms. My hands didn't move easily over it, rather the slightest bit of dust or dirt on the palm rest felt really gritty and I found myself constantly dusting the wretched thing down. I simply could not have seriously considered living with that.

So in the end it's an easy choice. The 8104 won, as it were, 'hands down'! Then I got the bonus prize. When I opened the box in the shop to check the display (always check for dud pixels and keep checking until you get zero. If the shop doesn't like it, go elsewhere) I found that my 8104 had a different finish to every other one in the shop or that I had seen elsewhere. Instead of the plain-Jane silver lid, this one has a metallic, textured, mesh-looking finish which looks like a silver version of the Ferrari. It's still not as stunning as the Ferrari itself, but far better than the usual finish. I think of it as my Aston Martin!

It's been a long time, now I'm coming back home

So sang The Beatles, back in the day, in that happy-tinged-with-melancholy number 'Wait'.

And it certainly has been a long time between blog posting for me, but I have a good excuse, honest. My UK holiday which turned into temporary relocation came to an end in December, and another relocation was required, back to sunny Adelaide. Since then I've been setting up a new business, home office and life. And now I feel like a little lie down.

I've missed blogging immensely, though — the interaction with readers, with the blogosphere as a whole and above all with myself and the dark recesses of my mind which tend to be explored and illuminated through writing.

So Eebahgum, Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Live long and prosper and so on to you all, and welcome back to normal trasmission.

Who is the beast? Why, it's a man of the cloth!

Yes, there's a mysterious 'vege-ravaging' beast rampaging around the UK, and this screen grab from the website of UGC cinemas finally reveals its identity! Look carefully in the bottom left corner and all will be revealed!

I've finally sung at St John's College, Cambridge!

At a fortnight's notice I was offered the opportunity to sing with the English Arts Chorale in their performance of the Bach B Minor Mass at St John's College, Cambridge last Saturday. Anyone who is familiar with the work will realise that it's one of the hardest sings in the repertoire—long, relentless and tiring. Having not sung it since the early 90s, I was a little sceptical that they'd actually take me at such short notice, but I was encouraged to come along and try out. I had dreamt of singing at Cambridge all my life, so how could I refuse?

So I showed up to the ante-penultimate rehearsal, got some of it right although I fumbled my way through several of the cruel runs at conductor Leslie Olive's cracking tempo. I was pronounced adequate without having to undergo their usual audition ordeal, and it was Cambridge, here we come. At this first rehearsal I was struck by the choir's excellent handling of the rapid bits, and real sense of ensemble and subtlety in the delicate bits. Les encourages everyone to sing the very least they need to create a good tone, and pursues a bright clear 'young' sound, and it works. The choir has a good blend of strong voices and for an amateur choir of 45 or 50 voices is very good indeed.

We arrived at St John's College on Saturday last for the big day. The College is lovely, dating back to the early 16th century. The Chapel, which is world famous for its choir and its acoustic is, surprisingly, much newer, having been built in the 1860s. It is nevertheless a beautiful building, with a magnificent polished floor, lovely roof treatment and austere dark woodwork. There's a Quicktime movie you can scroll around on St John's College website which you might like to check out. The place is long and thin, with the organ mounted above the Quire on the Cantoris side. One look at the place and you can see the sound is going to be nice and detailed in the front half, and a wash of meaningless noise at the back, and that's pretty much how it is.

We had been practicing at my son's school in Reigate, accompanied by piano. The dress rehearsal in this completely different space, now with organ and chamber ensemble was, frankly, a disaster. Suddenly without the percussive authority of the piano, tired from more than two hours travel, and perhaps a little overawed by the occasion, heads went down and timing went out the window. To add to the disaster, the oboist's music was lost, and the tenor soloist was clearly under-rehearsed. This could be ugly.

But as I said earlier, this is a pretty decent choir. With three hours between rehearsal and concert, would we get our heads together in time? Would there be anyone in the audience to care? And most urgently, how was I going to get my fat neck into the tiny bow tie with which I had been provided?

In the end, I need not have worried too much. Joanna fixed the bow tie with the ingenious application of safety pins--a girl thing if ever there were one. The audience was just shy of 250 which in a college chapel is pretty good. The tenor soloist had been working hard between times and was fine. Soloists were very good all round, and the violin, horn, flute and oboe generally excellent—top class players all. And the choir were suitably transformed—they sang well, with reasonable tightness and authority until the inevitable 'wall of tiredness' which affects every choir I've ever heard about two-thirds of the way through the Bach B Minor. After a couple of ensemble wobblies at that point, they recovered to a very musical conclusion. They could have been a little tighter on the day, and perhaps just a little more sophisticated in places, but overall it was pretty good, and in several places, brilliant. And the star of the show was Ian Le Grice, the choir's accompanist, on the organ.

So all told, a very good show. And what a joy it is to sing in that incredibly famous chapel. As wave after wave of audience applause washed over us at the end, I was high on the space and the sound, and just did not want to get off the stage, knowing I may never have this opportunity again—an absolute buzz.

My '6-week' world tour started last Christmas, but somehow didn’t involve any singing until quite recently. Of late I have performed Brahms Requiem with the Surrey Choral Festival, rehearsed Spem in Alium with the Tallis Scholars (yes THE Tallis Scholars), and soon I have another Spem with the highly regarded Exmoor Singers of London in early November, followed by yet another Spem with the English Arts Chorale at Arundel Cathedral, along with the Faure and Brahms Requiems. But in this 500th anniversary of Tallis's birth, every Spem is sacred, every Spem is great!

Earthquakes don't kill...

Behind the disturbing images currently on our TVs showing the aftermath of the earthquake in Pakistan lies an equally horrible truth which isn't getting much media attention—that most of the deaths could have been prevented.

Earthquake experts have long asserted that earthquakes don't kill, buildings do. And buildings generally don't unless people have messed up.

Although this has been a very significant earthquake, massively destructive because of its closeness to the surface of earth's crust, it would not have caused anything like the carnage had buildings been properly built in conformity with the building codes present in most countries. Bad engineering, non-existent quality control, inadequate government regulation and quite probably systemic corruption have led directly to the death of tens of thousands of innocent people, many of them children. Lack of capital may well be an issue, but the Pakistani government has no difficulty finding the money to play nuclear games or engage in pointless military conflict with India.

Whilst the international community is rallying to provide much-needed assistance, I hope we're also willing to call a spade a spade, so that something positive can come of this disaster.