KillerNoteBook Wakazachi vs Acer TravelMate 8215WLMi

1. Anti-shock protection is a scam. I don't put every cotton picken little buzz word on my notebooks. The notebooks I use are industry leaders and retail hard drives with 3 and 5 year manufacturer warranty's. Either Hitachi or Seagate, these are the top 2 players. ACER uses WD Scorpio HD's which are notorious for being junk.

2. The ACER uses a 5,400 rpm hard drive instead of a 7,200 in the Wakizachi. You might as well just can the Core 2 Duo because when you are limiting it with a slow hard drive you aren't going to see the performance. Size is one thing, but if you have 160 gigs of data to put on a mobile PC, you should probably get an external SATA and ExpressCard eSATA solution, transfer the data at 1.5 Gbps and have the speed of an internal desktop HD and a zillion times more space. Big is one thing, but my systems are built to perform. 100 gig 7,200 is the largest 7,200 rpm drive you can get right now. I can't even begin to tell you how slow that system is going to be, especially with how ACER splits the HD's and uses a FAT file system for their OS, they are idiots!

3. As far as the same RAM, yea, it's the same size chips. I will guaranty that ACER is using some generic chip junk RAM and it is going to be like putting pump gas in a race car. I use OCZ DDR2 RAM with a lifetime warranty so you know you're getting the best performance you can.

4. Acer throw's in a 1GB sdcard and voip phone... I would definitely get the ACER then. I mean a 1 GB SD card is about seventeen dollars, and the phone is nice, then you can call tech support whenever you need to and wait on hold.

This is a direct email I received from a customer in Singapore:
Just wanted to let you know that I did receive the Executioner sometime last week, and I had been head over heels immersed in it, found some time to come up for a breath of air and write this mail to you. It is everything I had hoped it would be, and then some.

A huge thank you, Mark, for the Executioner, I am extremely happy with it, and I know for a fact that I will continue to be extremely happy for a long time to come, it's such a kick ass machine!

Thank you sir!

Best Regards,
Wilbie Poh, Singapore

A stark contrast from this: ACER - Very poor support thread.
Yes Acer customer service is really crap. I tried calling them so many times. I have sent my laptop for repairs and they are still awaiting parts. This is after holding my laptop for 25 days. I also do get cut off after holding on for 30 mins.

there are many other websites talking about about the low quality and terrible support and after sale care of ACER.

So you need to ask yourself a question...
"Do I feel lucky?"
"Well, do ya, punk?"

Well, I'm pretty happy with my Wakizachi, I've had it for about 2 months. Before I discovered Killer Notebooks, I had settled on buying an Acer 8204, the top of the line model that Acer offers in the U.S., with similar specs as the model you're interested in. Acer does have some models specifically designed for gaming, the Ferrari series, but the Travelmate 8204 has them beat, it has a better GPU.
After I discoverd Killer Notebooks, there was no going back to Acer. As Mark from Killer Notebooks mentioned, Acer does have some odd quirks, like the hard drive formatted in FAT 32. You can change that without too much trouble, but you shouldn't have to. The things that Mark pointed out about RAM and the hard drive are significant.
You will be very pleased with the level of customer support he offers. He always answers emails promptly, and has the right answers. This is pretty important, and a rarity these days. After configuring several nearly identical systems from various vendors, I found that Killer Notebooks had them all beat on quality and price. I'd go with the Wakizachi.

Yup that's why I mentioned nevermind the anti-shock cos its not worth looking at. But regarding RPM is it really significant in games?

If the game is programmed to read the hardrive frequently then probably it's badly done as HDD reads are really slow even 7200. But I wouldn't deny that during times like level loading it would be significant.

But in anyway I wouldn't mind getting a better HDD for the same price, or better yet much cheaper as the rest of the guys mentioned  .

Well, remember with the hard drive, the Windows Page File is on there too so it is a very inregral part of the system.

I am not even talking about games, even just loading Windows and running Windows, let alone opening new programs... believe me, it makes a big difference.

My g/f has a little 1.5 Celeron (I know, I know, but the thing is little more than the most expensive deck of cards in the world). I thought I would save a little money, just get this instead of giving her something she doesn't need. This system happens to be an ACER. She got it in Feb, and already the mouse is wearing out, the screen randomly goes "white lines' so "don't move the lcd at all", the hard drive died and was replaced with a 7,200 rpm and it is much faster. If it helps a Celery 1.5 what do you think it will do with a CPU like the C2D that actually has some ballz?

At the end of the day though, I thought I was saving money, and this thing is more like a disposable lighter than a laptop computer. It wasted more of my time then anything and since it needs replaced already, it has cost me MORE than if I would have given her a system off my own shelf!

Sometimes it is hard for people to understand the performance differance. It is like going to the store and looking at 2 tv's side by side. If you don't have the better tv, and don't know what it looks like, and are going by just the spec's... it is just numbers.

I have notebooks I use every day so when one is slow I freaking know it... I am so impatient the thing is probably lucky the window is so far away from my table. The moral of this story is that a 7,200 rpm hard drive is one of the things in your system that is going to absolutely give you the most noticable bang for your buck.

Well I do agree that HDDs have always been the bottleneck forever, so it will always make the biggest difference whenever HD and page reads are frequent.

just an update, I got the travelmate because of mainly location issues that would lead to long downtimes, shipping charges in the case of anything going wrong (and we know lots of things go wrong in all kinda laptops esp when you carry them around frequently)

Nevertheless Mark is great, answers all email promptly and goes all out to customize a system that matches my needs (and is not stingy on discounts that he is able to give).

As for the travelmate, so far so good (close to a mnth) and is definitely the fastest machine I've owned. carbon fibre looks great and solid. But with the bad reputation I did extend my warranty to 3 years lol. And with that warranty purchase, they gave me another S$200 off my total bill. Final bill S$3468 = US$2202 with 3 years warranty.

There's one thing though, I noticed a bright spot in my screen recently that only appears if you look thru the sides of the lcd, it doesnt appear when you look straight at it. It's not like its really annoying cos why would I want to look at the screen slant anyways, but I wanted to test my luck and went to the service centre. No questions asked, they fixed a new screen and it is guaranteed you get your laptop back in 2 hours (I pity the technicians in there...). I'm not sure about elsewhere, but acer service is good in singapore as at least this first experience with them was good lol (and from other singaporeans as well, can be seen in singaporean forums like hardwarezone.com).

Anyway, we'll see as I use the laptop more, whether the prophecy holds true lol.