Acer TimelineU M5-581TG-6666 15.6" Ultrabook

Pros: -Graphics
-Price
-Speed
-Weight
-Keypad
-Backlight

Cons: -USB port positioning
-Power button positioning
-Wacky touchpad

Other Thoughts: I got this laptop about three months ago because I needed it for school, but since I had to make an expenditure like this, I decided I wanted a computer that would be good for gaming as well. Found his gem after searching through a lot of others and the specs coupled with the price almost seemed like a trick. Ordered it anyway, and it's great. Plays games smoothly at default and sometimes higher (only tried ARMA II and Oblivion so far). The screen is nice, but the viewing angle can be strange at times. The track pad hates you, so don't use it, get a mouse, heh. "Bloatware" doesn't really bother me, but I can see how it would annoy others. The power button is a troll. It waits there, menacingly, until you need to make a slight adjustment in your laptop's position, then laughs as you audibly sigh and facepalm once your lappy turns off. All in all, though, this laptop does a great job of replacing it's fallen comrade. (Jedi Lappy, you shall be missed.)

Pros: Slim, light

Cons: Graphics card isn't what I was expecting. Render time is slower than anticipated, although I knew it'd be a laptop I expected it to be at least a little better with the onboard graphics. I use photoshop and various microscopy tools for lab work and play the occasional game.

Today I was traveling in an airplane and had a bag in a protective sleeve in my backpack. When I took the laptop out of the bag the screen was broken. Not really a crack, but it was 'bleeding' from one corner and there are striations across the entire screen.

Newegg, as is understandable with their policy, couldn't help me but gave me the manufacturer's number. The manufacturer politely said 'lol, get bent'

Other Thoughts: Debating replacing the screen or buying a more robust model.

Pros: Sleek, powerful, and for the most part well designed. I particularly like the integrated keypad. And the display is very sharp.

Cons: Only con that I've discovered is the lack of buttons on the touch pad....this really takes some getting used to!!

Pros: Display is crystal clear. Very easy to connect to TV. The DVD drive does not add to the girth either. I couldn't be happier.

Cons: The only con I can come up with is that the touch pad is a little hard to left click. You have to click more than once sometimes.

Pros: Acer tech support was better then I expected.

Cons: The laptop came from newegg doa. The back light on the keyboard would come on but that is all. I was going to rma it to newegg but they have discontinued the model and did not have any in stock. I sent the laptop to Acer for repair took them aprox 7 days for them to repair it.

Other Thoughts: For the price you cannot beat the specs on this laptop. I just hope I did the right thing sending it in for repair instead of a refund.

Pros: This is a decently powered laptop, but it is very very thin and high quality looking. The screen I'm not too fond of, but that's always been the case with acer screens. Overall a solid machine, and love the fact that it has a number pad.

Cons: First one that arrived was bad - touch pad would stop working at a certain angle, and the wifi seemed to operate without an antenna connected because the range was lousy.

The second one's wifi worked great, and the touch pad issue was not there. However, the touch pad itself is a poor excuse of a pointing device. Hopefully further driver updates will fix that. It's trying to copy some of the MacBook Pro functionality (two finger right click, scrolling and so on) however, it does it poorly and most of the time you have to repeat the same action because it seems to ignore one of your fingers. It's not only in some spot, and I'm sure everything is fine with the hardware. It's just a poor design over all.

Other Thoughts: Once you get used to the screen you're fine. The touch pad however is a bit too annoying so I'm using a usb mouse.

Pros: I run a tech consulting business with several employees. I purchased this laptop for my wife who handles a single QuickBooks database. That is all this laptop does-run Quick Books.
Structurally, it has an ok design for a low-end ultra book. The keys are a bit sloppy but the construction appears ok.

Cons: The electrical components, (motherboard, power modules, lcd components are without a doubt the most poorly built I have ever seen or owned. Within 3 weeks the LCD Panel failed. I obtained an RMA from ACER and sent it to be repaired (the shipping was $27). They returned it within 7 days-they replaced the LCD LED Module and a 4GB Memory stick.
But guess what, within 2 days, the LCD failed again. It failed in the same original way, all it does is turn on, the keyboard lights up, you can hear a fan running but the LCD does not work. I am planning to call ACER back today and intend on demanding a replacement model, or a refund, but I wanted to post this review before anyone else made the unfortunate mistake of purchasing this pathetic useless laptop. I would NOT recommend this laptop to anyone.

Pros: Lightweight, good speed, good price.

Cons: - The fan runs almost constantly and it is loud.
- Playing Civ 5 is enough to make the fan rise to shrill roar.
- In a 68 degree F room, the fan will come on during basic internet browsing (not videos).
- The touchpad is terrible, as other reviewers have noted.
- Customer service is not helpful.
- Battery life is terrible if you try to play a video game.

Other Thoughts: I'm not sure if there's two assembly lines for this machine and one makes good machines and the other makes lemons. My experience with this machine has NOT been like most of the other reviews here.

This is NOT a gaming machine. Even moderate use causes the fan to run loudly and constantly. My test game was Civ 5, which came out in 2010. The battery didn't last two hours and the noise was so loud that my wife refused to be in the same room while I tried to play. When I called customer service, I was told to mail in the laptop to have the fan repaired. Even though the machine was under warranty (I had owned it 2 days), I had to pay for shipping. They replaced the fan and... everything runs exactly as before with the fan sounding like a jet engine during even moderate use. I'm an academic and I would hesitate to use this laptop in the library. Very, very disappointed.

Pros: As confirmed by my own purchase from newegg and the notebookcheck.net review, the listing in this description is wrong, it in fact DOES come with the non-LE 640m chip (with 1GB of gddr5). GPU-Z does explicitly distinguish between both types.

Cons: screen contrast/black levels are very meh, but it doesn't suffer from the screen door effect you see on sooo many 15" 1366x768 panels. Fan while gaming is constantly loud/whiny, but what did you expect? Obviously no dedicated SSD at this price. Laptop seems to suffer from some inescapable bloat in that it sees consistently high ram usage (~3GB doing practically nothing) with no obvious cause.

Pros: To give some context to my review: I'm a current student studying computer science and so am using this computer extensively in many different tasks. I built a desktop a few years back and have been doing all of my work on that, but as I commute back and forth to school and am taking higher level courses which require more and more programming and the like, I needed to find a portable solution with enough zing to handle whatever I threw at it. After extensive research I chose this laptop, and I definitely made the right choice.

To begin, this computer is extremely fast. I know other reviews complain of the hard disk speed, but there is a certain amount of flash swap space on the drive (20GB if I'm not mistaken) which make it comparable to any 7200RPM HDD, if not faster. The processor, while not being top of the line, does its job very well in any situation. That, along with the 6GB of decent memory, allow me to run MS Office, Chrome, multiple IDE's, and other programs simultaneously without a single hiccup.

Graphically, this laptop is a portable powerhouse. So far I've only played Starcraft II and Portal (obviously not the greatest benchmark games, but I will try more) on the highest settings with perfect performance. The screen, while not being full HD, is very crisp and vibrant.

The battery life of this machine is absolutely amazing. I've never owned a laptop with a battery lasting over four hours, but I am now rolling on hour 6 without being plugged in doing moderate to extensive work and still have 44% of my battery remaining. A great technique used to save battery life used by this laptop is switching to processor graphics instead of the dedicated card when it is not needed, a seamless transition.

Finally, the design. This is by far one of the nicest laptops I have ever used, and I mean that without exaggeration. The case is industrially sturdy, and feels as if it could take quite the beating (not that I plan on throwing it around, but you get my point.) It is thin, but not too thin (if you've ever picked up any other ultrabook and thought "I think I might snap this if I breath too close to it," you'll understand what I mean by not too thin.) I favor the keyboard on this laptop more than I do my Saitek Eclipse II keyboard used on my desktop, which is saying a lot. The keys and perfectly responsive, and the back-light is a great touch.

Cons: The cons I'm putting here are completely negligible, but I'll put them anyway.

1. All of the ports (USB, ethernet, etc...) are in the back of the laptop with none on the side. I know, not that big of a deal, but could cause minor annoyances if you don't like moving your hand an extra 4 inches.

2. The power button is on the front outside of the case instead of the usual spot inside of the case. I guess it could cause one to accidentally hit the power button more often, but so far I haven't had any trouble with it.

Aaaaaand thats it. If either of those things are a deal breaker for you, you need to take a long look at what your life has become.

Other Thoughts: All in all I think that this is the perfect laptop for any situation. It handles anything you throw at it, can run modern games at decent settings, has an extremely long battery life, and is well beyond worth what it costs. I highly recommend this to any and all looking for a portable computing powerhouse.

As a side note, I noticed in a few reviews the reviewer stated that the trackpad gets in the way of typing if you have larger hands. I can attest that it doesn't, as my mutantly massive hands have no trouble with the track pad while my giant sausage fingers slam against the keys. But anyway, if you've reached this far in the review, just buy the laptop. You won't be disappointed.