Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Acer Laptop Battery
As back-to-school season enters its dog days, one clear-cut winner in that regard is the Acer Timeline U M5-481TG with battery such as Acer AS09B58 battery , Acer AL10A31 battery , Acer AL10B31 battery , Acer Aspire One D260 battery , Acer Aspire 1830 battery , Acer Aspire One 753 battery , Acer AL10D56 battery , Acer Extensa 2400 battery , Acer BATEFL50L6C48 battery , Acer AS09D56 battery , Acer AS09D36 battery , Acer AS09D31 battery , an ultrabook with all the trimmings that costs as little as $779.
And by all the trimmings, I mean all of them: the M5-481TG configuration I reviewed has Nvidia GeForce GT 640M LE graphics, a 500GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, a backlit keyboard, and even a DVD drive, all crammed into a 14-inch laptop shell that feels no bigger really than the generic and more expensive Toshiba Satellite U845.
The Timeline U M5 is the U.S. version of a laptop I previewed a long time ago that never saw the light of day here, the Acer Aspire M3. The M5 has a smaller footprint and a newer Intel Core i5 processor.
Technically, the Timeline U M5-481TG is an ultrabook. You can throw that terminology out the window, though, because this Timeline is really just a very reasonably priced thin full-fledged laptop with nearly no compromises...assuming, of course, you're willing to forgive a somewhat forgettable design. At this price, you should.
The Acer Timeline U M5-481TG, while being thinner than previous Acer Timeline laptops, is not exactly thin or light compared with its ultrabook brethren: at 4.2 pounds and 0.8 inch thick, it'll feel heavier and thicker than most competitors. However, compared with your regular everyday laptop, the Timeline U will feel, with apologies to Mr. Creosote, wafer-thin. Such is the strange middle ground of the "thinnerbooks": the Sony Vaio S is close to the same size class, and so is the Toshiba Satellite U845. The Acer's feature set more closely matches the Vaio S, however, than the oddly pared-down Satellite U845. It all comes down to expectations: most pared-down ultrabooks trade off features for size. In this size class, I'm fine with a bigger chassis if it affords all the extras this Timeline U manages to cram in. The Satellite U845 felt disappointing for the same reasons this Timeline U feels impressive.
Equipped with a now-common-for-ultrabooks 1.7GHz Intel Core i5-3317U CPU, the Acer Timeline U M5-481TG showed nearly equivalent performance on our benchmark tests to the Dell Inspiron 14z and Samsung Series 9, both of which had the same processor in our review configurations. This Timeline U is plenty fast enough for everyday needs, and Intel's latest third-generation Core i-series low-voltage processors are more efficient and somewhat faster than last year's CPUs. It's a great processor for most people.
In bootup time the U M5 matches some midrange ultrabooks with hybrid hard drives I've recently tested. I was able to cold-boot to on, with Wi-Fi, in 27 seconds, which is better than most laptops with traditional hard drives, but worse than SSD-bearing laptops like a MacBook Air or Samsung Series 9. Waking from sleep was a different story: I found the default state didn't wake from sleep when the lid was closed, and I needed to press the power button on the front each time.
This Acer's 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 640M LE graphics are quite impressive too, and a significant step up in power from the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics in most ultrabooks. Dirt 3 ran its benchmark at 67.6 frames per second at 1,366x768-pixel resolution and medium graphics settings, and 52.9fps at high graphics settings, while our Street Fighter IV test ran at a blazing 74.9fps. Even Metro 2033, a challenging game to run well, performed at 17.3fps at native resolution with graphics settings on high.
The Acer Timeline U M5 may not be a hardcore gaming laptop, but it can certainly run games. That lower-res 1,366x768 screen helps frame rates look good, if nothing else. Comparatively, the competitively priced Dell Inspiron 14z's AMD Radeon graphics fared far worse on the same tests (44fps on Street Fighter, 9.7fps on Metro 2033).