Acer Aspire TimelineX 4820TG Owners Lounge

[iwin2000]

Have they been updated at all recently?

Yup the amd/intel drivers for the 4820tg from the acer site were updated around august 20th so they are pretty recent.

I have a separate question: Can anyone with a ATI 6550M card check this out for me, I thought the card had dedicated 1GB of VRAM but if I look in DXDIAG (start >> run >> "dxdiag") it says I only got 590MB. Is that what everyone else has?

[Apex84]

I am having an issue updating to the latest ATI drivers through their catalyst software. I get the proper card (even tried doing it autodetect just to make sure I was doing it right and was), download, and then when it goes to begin installation I get this error:



Anyone have any ideas?

You have to set the graphics to "Discrete" in BIOS for the installer to recognize the ATI GPU. When it's installed you can revert to "Switchable" in BIOS.

[TheChappie]

You have to set the graphics to "Discrete" in BIOS for the installer to recognize the ATI GPU. When it's installed you can revert to "Switchable" in BIOS.

Oh so it is doable to update to latest then?

[cruisx]

Hey been a while since i posted here, had the 4820 for i think 1 full year now and its been great. Just wondering whats the next upgrade path if one is looking to buy a new laptop?

Mainly looking for a laptop with better graphics but still being able to get the 4+hrs of batt life and 14" form factor.

[Apex84]

Oh so it is doable to update to latest then?

Yes you can update to the latest ATI drivers this way.

[downloads]

@iwin2000

For ATI it should be showing roughly 2700MB- 1GB of dedicated memory and the rest is so called HyperMemory.
Were you switched to ATI when you started DXDIAG?

[Sxooter]

Hey been a while since i posted here, had the 4820 for i think 1 full year now and its been great. Just wondering whats the next upgrade path if one is looking to buy a new laptop?

Mainly looking for a laptop with better graphics but still being able to get the 4+hrs of batt life and 14" form factor.

There's still not a lot to really compete with the 4820TG right now. The Asus U46SV etc are only slightly more powerful but with a 35W GPU instead of the ~20W GPU in the 4820TG so they tend to run much hotter. And for all that you get 2 or 3 fps improvement in gaming.the Alienware M14x has a GT555M which is a bit more powerful than that, but it's as heavy or heavier than most 15" machines. Don't even consider the overheating / throttling mess that is the 3830/4830TG machines.

[iwin2000]

@iwin2000

For ATI it should be showing roughly 2700MB- 1GB of dedicated memory and the rest is so called HyperMemory.
Were you switched to ATI when you started DXDIAG?

Yes I am on the ATI graphics and I was on ATI graphics when I took that screenshot. I double checked. I'm not sure why it's not showing the 1GB dedicated memory.

I can't think of why it would be that way. Only thing I can think of is that I have my system pagefile disabled, so that might be affecting it. It could also be a bad driver install I guess I could try reinstalling them.

The only way I found out was that I was benchmarking my system for Battlefield 3 and it said I failed the system requirement for graphics due to my low VRAM.

[downloads]

Pagefile doesn't affect this- driver is another matter but it's still weird.
Although you may want to check it- it's most likely to be the root of the problem.

[TheGoddamn]

I've recently had trouble with my 4820TG-- it kept freezing shortly after boot, with the Windows 7 spinning "wait" mouse cursor still being active. I could move the mouse around, but it wouldn't do anything. In addition, when I tried to play GTA IV, I would be able to explore and play around fine, and even get into missions, but the whole system would just freeze at a mission's completion point.

After a fair amount of system reboots and scans (both ESET Smart Security 5 and Emsisoft say I'm clean) it appears to be working all right, though I haven't tried any games on it post-recovery. The freezing isn't happening anymore.

However, I've noticed something on the My Computer screen: my D: and G: partitions both have around 10GB less free space. (My hard drive has three partitions: C, D, and G). But if I manually select everything in the respective drives, their total adds up to what they would have been normally; that is, each drive, when examined in this manner, doesn't reflect the phantom 10 gigs each. I realize this manual "Properties..." inspection isn't exactly the best way to check things out.

If anyone has any idea what's going on, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Here are my specs:

CPU: Intel Core i5-460m 2.53GHz
GPU: Radeon Mobility 5650
Motherboard: Acer ZQ1B
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) G.Skill 1333MHz DDR3 F3-10666CL9S-2GBSQ (though I suppose it peaks at 1066 because of the processor)
HDD: Western Digital 640GB 5400 RPM (WD6400BEVT-22A0RT0)
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, with latest updates