Acer Aspire V5-571 review

 Slim and light are the two obvious words that come to mind when you take the new Acer Aspire V5-571 out of its box. This is a 15.6" notebook made of tough plastic made to look like silver metal that should sit very comfortably into a backpack or briefcase.

It's less than 23mm thick and at just 2.3kg is not going to cause serious arm strain. It feels reasonably sturdy and the hinge in particular is reassuringly solid when you flex it. The keyboard is the type where the keys are all isolated apart from the left shift and enter keys which annoyingly have adjacent keys attached to them - thus providing plenty of opportunity for striking the wrong one.

 When you're in full typing flow the keys feel somewhat dead and unresponsive and it feels strange to have the Del key directly above the backspace. The touchpad, though, is very large and highly responsive, yet I'm not convinced that it was an entirely smart move to place it so far to the left of centre.

A glance round the edges reveals an SD card holder unobtrusively hidden under the front, a handy DVD optical drive on the right side and three USB ports (one of them 3.0) plus an HDMI output. What is new - and I suspect part of a growing trend - is an adaptor slot that comes with a supplied split lead for either VGA or Ethernet usage, depending on your need.

Under the hood is an Intel Core i3 2367M processor clocked at 1.4GHz, which is quite sufficient to cope with regular light usage (web browsing, MS Office documents, etc.) and it also packs a decent 8GB RAM. On the other hand, with a basic Intel HD 3000 graphics card and a screen resolution of 1368 x 766 (i.e. less than Full HD), you're not going to be using this for any form of serious gaming unless you go for the slightly higher spec version with NVIDIA graphics.

On the positive side, you do have a hefty 500GB HDD for storage (no SSD at this price) and if you have high activity for all functions simultaneously, you can manage about 5 hours before you need to re-charge. So for a price point around £450, the Acer Aspire V5-571 is defintely worth considering for low level usage especially when you're on the move.


Score: 3.5/5