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Looking for a new laptop since I got rid of my old one and I think I have it narrowed down to two of them.

1. Samsung Series 3 12.5 inch

2. Acer TimelineX 13.3 inch

Both of them have an i5, 4gb of ram, and 500gb HDD. All of the other connections are pretty similar as well with the exception the Acer has USB 3.0.

I will use them for mainly web browsing, light coding, writing articles, and light photoshop. Each one should handle all of this with no problem and either way I go I will probably upgrade to an SSD down the road.

Anyone have any preference or read any in depth reviews of either. The battery life is my main concern and I am not finding any real good numbers on them.

Thanks for looking.

Rule-of-thumb for Acer is that you get the most possible hardware for your money, but the support (should you need it) is rather lousy.

There are two older Timelines in this household, an 1810 that I use mostly on business trips and weekends (no issues at all), and a 3810 that one of my roommates owns and uses as his primary computer. Unfortunately, said 3810 developed a defect in the display connector not long after the warranty ran out, so the LCD is missing the left-most 5% of the display, preferring instead to show lots of pretty colored vertical lines in that space.

No experience at all with Samsung PCs.

I prefer Acer. I love the big screen and since you mention it's just for browsing, I think it is better.

Samsung. Acer build quality is usually pretty bad. Though haven't had my hands on any of their new ones for a while so I may be biased.

Thinkpad or Apple. Pretty much everything else under $1000 is crap.

The bad press on that Acer is basically limited to the 3830TG model, which has severe thermal throttling issues due to the combination of a beefy GT540M GPU, thin chassis, and single cooling fan. The one you're looking at has only the HD 3000 GPU, so it should be fine.

That's too much for the Acer though; it's regularly in the CDN$500 range up here with coupons from Staples. And that's the 3830TG - the vanilla 3830T should be even less. Shop around, you can do better.

I prefer Samsung. Acer parts quality is not good. So, quality wise go for Samsung.