
Acer's Aspire Series offers a diverse range of notebooks with the performance, graphics and communication tools to maximize your digital entertainment, complete your daily tasks, and keep you in touch with friends and family, whether you're at home or on the go.
Powerful PC performanceWith the abundance of graphics-intensive multimedia and sharing applications available these days, smooth multitasking is more vital than ever before. So Aspire Series notebooks pack today's best processors and memory options so your system always runs efficiently. This series also provides ample storage for all the multimedia files you may wish to keep.
Pros: Has some nice, hidden features of interest to the hardcore techies Mix of USB2 and USB3 ports Rather upgradeable Very powerful for the money
Cons: Missing LED indicators that most other machines take for granted 5400rpm drive and Acer Bloatware makes it feel slow Feels cheap and plasticky Infuriating Trackpad Small capacity battery
Overall Review: Pretty decent machine for the money (This is really the Aspire V5-171 6860 model) The positives: a) The CPU is the 1.7GHz version of the Core i5 UltraBook CPU series - it's not slow by any means - and it comes with virtualization/cryptographic acceleration built-in. It has the faster HD4000 graphics chip, the Quicksync video conversion circuitry, and I have yet to see it "run slow" on anything modern. b) The machine is rather upgradable. It features 2 DDR3 mobile RAM slots, and can take up to 16GB of RAM in total. The wireless card is a Broadcom dualband (not single-band) 802.11n/Bluetooth combo card and can be swapped out with no BIOS locks, and the HDD bay will take 2.5mm 7mm Z-height drives (not 9.5mm standard drives - a little annoying there) The really good feature is that it comes with 1 USB3 port on the left, and 2 USB2 on the right. If you run VMWare you will see that as a massive plus (VMWare's USB arbitrator cannot do USB3->2 Translations) c) The BIOS is minimal, but quite generous when it comes to features left on - Virtualization is enabled, as is the no-execute bit and the vt-d/IOMMU. You can run KVM straight out of the box, which is not the case in most other laptops in this price range. The negatives: a) 5400rpm drive - no, Acer. Seriously? Decent CPU and sub-par HDD? And you have to shove a massive dose of bloatware in there? You are better off getting the entitlement key from the machine and do a clean install. Better yet, swap out that HDD and get a faster, 7200rpm model...preferrably a full disk encryption model. b) The touchpad will drive you nuts - It's not well regarded by press reviewers...and for a good reason. The button is built into the trackpad, and it does a semi-awful job detecting clicks. c) Acer trimmed back the LED indicators to only power and charge activity. No HDD indication or wireless connectivity, and no keyboard "lock" indications, so you can't tell whether the machine hung or is taking a long time due to swappage. What were you thinking, Acer?! d) The Battery has some seriously short legs - I have yet to see it go beyond 4 hours. Conclusion - this is an okay machine if you like large features at a bargain basement price. It would have been a great machine if Acer charged more and actually did less cost-cutting.