Acer Aspire Timeline X 3820T

[schmickey]

Wish I could help but I'm not very knowledgeable about power issues. This appears to be a major weak spot in Ubuntu and I hope the developers can address it soon. Since I rarely run my laptop on battery and it doesn't seem to get too hot I don't worry about it much.

[fhteagle]

For everyone looking to get lower power usage, longer battery life, and less heat from their 3820T:

Upgrade to kernel 2.6.36 from Ubuntu Kernel-PPA. It has a multi-core scheduler patch that really drove down interrupts, wakeups, and therefore power. I'm seeing 11W typical with display full dim in Xubuntu 10.10 (high compositor effects). Had the computer up over 5 hours taking notes, skimming pdfs, and surfing over wifi today and still had 30+% battery left.

2.6.37 does not allow screen dimming even with grub edits, and isnt stable enough yet in my opinion, so stick with 2.6.36.

Last thing I will recommend is ditching Adobe Flash if you can. Even an "idle" npviewer.bin (no sites with any flash content open in Firefox or Chrome) by itself is responsible for more wakeups/interrupts than all other processes combined on my system...

Hope this helps.

[Ace_NoOne]

Thanks fhteagle, that sounds promising!

For everyone looking to get lower power usage, longer battery life, and less heat from their 3820T:

Upgrade to kernel 2.6.36 from Ubuntu Kernel-PPA. [...] 2.6.37 [...] isnt stable enough yet in my opinion, so stick with 2.6.36.

Excuse my ignorance, but 2.6.36 doesn't seem to be available:
After adding the PPA (sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa; sudo apt-get update), a search for "2.6.36" only returns "linux-backports-modules-compat-wireless-2.6.36-2.6.35-23-ge", which doesn't seem like the right thing?

[AbiGeuS]

Hi all.
I am from Russia, so sorry for my English.
I have acer aspire 3820T without bluetooth. I installed ubuntu 10.10. I was found some bug. After I push fn+7 to disable touchpad, keyboard stops responding to keystrokes, and ceases to operate the menu on the main panel. If someone else have the same problem and know how to solve it, please let me know.

---
With Best Wishes AbiGeuS

[jossec]

I have the 3820T only with Intel HD graphics, without optical drive and the 9-cell battery and changed the HD for a 120 GB Intel SSD and put Ubuntu 10.10 (64 bits) on it. It is very fast. I need to do some SSD tweaking yet and will add 4 GB of RAM. I applied the changes in GRUB for the LED dimming (only tweak really needed). In Powertop I can easily go below 10 W (Idle of course, capacity of 9-cell is around 90 Wh) and it is even suggesting things for powering down the sound adapter. I don't know if powersave options on a SSD make a lot of difference. Replacing the HD is a breeze if you can unscrew the big plastic plate where the memory and HD sits. The memory banks are pretty large.

The notebook is really silent and you only hear the fan when under heavy load and even then it must be really silent before you can hear it.

Right now, I would advise this notebook to any Ubuntu 10.10 user.

[jlh68]

I have the 14-inch screen 4820T TimelineX. I can not get the HDMI out put to work correctly. The colors are off. I get pink for where the white is and some other strange colors.

Does anyone know what the problem is?

Also this unit does not have the ATI graphics card, I mention this as there are several posts in this thread asking about it. Mine has the Intel HD Graphics. I have most everything working except the special "P" key and the HDMI output. The VGA output works fine. I do not have the multi-gesture working yet.

I can't get my power usage down below 11-Watts, but I almost always have the WIFI on. I use Intel's Powertop to reduce load.

[BreenLantern]

I recently bought the 3820T-7459
My experience with on 10.10 with 2.6.35-24-generic

WLAN - works out of the box. Great.
Display/brightness - Brightness didn't work out of the box, but was easily fixed with the default grub fix on the first page.
Audio - works out of the box, and SPDIF headphone jack output hooked up pretty easily to my logitech speakers.
Mic - works with fader adjusted...Quality is ok enough for webcam chat
Webcam - Quality is meh, but nice to not have to carry around an external webcam

Touchpad - this is probably what bugs me the most, does anyone have any idea on how to turn off tap to click? it bugs the crap out of me when I try and type, i found it was easy when I had a synaptics touchpad, but this has an ALPS, and it is recognized as a PS/2 mouse. Any idea on if any of this can be fixed?

Overall I am pretty happy with it... trying to see how much fixing the display increases the battery life.

[jlh68]

Have you tried [system] > [mouse] > [touchpad], click under [general] "disable touchpad when typing"?

Yes having a active tap on touchpad is annoying.

[BreenLantern]

Well there is no touchpad section due to the system recognizing the ALPS as a ps/2 mouse...

[jlh68]

Go to software center and install

Configuration module for laptop touchpad

.

Maybe that will provide the solution.