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Acer Aspire E1-531-B9604G50Mnks
by AdamFreeman
In my time I have owned a number of laptops and computers, from the Windows 95 days to the present day Windows 8 era, and after my last laptop broke I'd been searching for a new laptop at a moderate price that would suit my everyday computer needs and after weighing out a few options, I decided to by the ACER E1-531 for a moderate sum of ... £350, which for a 8GB laptop seemed like a pretty good deal.
When the laptop arrived my first impressions were pretty good when I took it out of the packaging, the design of the whole thing looked good and modern as expected and with a HD screen whatever things you are viewing on the screen , it will look fantastic.
What disappointed me a little were the specs, which is partly my fault for not researching the specification properly, since I'd paid extra for the 8gb laptop it was fast when viewing pages on the internet and when your offline, but for high spec viewing the 2.2 GHz processor seems a little lacklustre and doesn't back up the 8GB you have paid for, so if your thinking about getting this laptop I'd go for the cheaper 4GB option, and if your a gamer stay clear, the graphics engine is rating at 5.7 out of 10 so for modern PC games the laptop just won't be able to handle the graphics, this to me was really disappointed as ACER say it has Intel HD graphics capabilities which are poor.
The laptop comes with the new windows 8 which can be a very annoying program to have, it doesn't come with a basic Microsoft office either for all you people who need office, you'll have to shell out big bucks for the programs. There is a inbuilt Super Multi DL Drive for all your burring and DVD viewing needs. You will find yourself having to download a lot of the basics programs you expect with a laptop like media player, paint etc..
The keypad to me with my job is important, it has to be good quality and last, but when you first start typing on this laptop they keys do feel pretty cheap, especially compared to Samsung and other leading laptop makers and with the windows 8 program installed you'll find that random apps keep appearing when your moving the mouse which after awhile will really get on your nerves, clearly not much time has been spend on a good quality keyboard which makes your experience with this laptop suffer.
Yes there's a lot of little issues with the laptop that bring it down, but if your just looking for a basic laptop to do everyday normal things then I will recommend this laptop to you, it does the basics well but is far from spectacular compared with rival machinery. And for the £350 I bought it for I feel I should have gone with another, unless you can get it cheap I'd for a Samsung for a similar price.
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Sony VAIO E Series SVE1511M1E
by joshmathew
Ok, so its been almost 3 months since i bought my laptop, lets divide this review into pros and cons.
Pros -
1 -> Build Quality, yes its not a mono-cog design, but its still very very strong, I travel alot with it, around 1000 to 1500 miles every month, in the mean time I use buses and railways. And sometimes, ... kilos of luggage is kept over my laptop bag, still no signs of damage. And you can't feel how strong it is even by holding it, but it certainly is very strong. Also, the rests and the 60% of body is made of metallic materials, which gives it a very beautiful looking design.
2 -> Speakers, It's got excellent speakers for a laptop in its price range. Sony's been using there new xLoud audio technology and its phenomenal. Yes, it lacks bass, but its very powerful, and can be heard all over the room, no need to carry external set of speakers for general purpose.
3 -> Ketboard, It's got a very nice keyboard, its gives a feedback of a mechanical keyboard, also its a full desktop keyboard, so there's no problem using it.
4 -> Performance, It can run any game on the market period. I've played Hitman absolution, need for speed run, and most wanted 2, no problem, not a hint of lag. Mostlly on higher than medium settings. Its surprising what a laptop in this price range can do.
5 -> Heat sink, Sony was really on a point when they were designing this laptop, it literally never gets hot, even on intense gaming some mildly hot gas is released by the heat sink place conveniently on the left of the laptop (next of the USB port), so you're not blocking it even by placing it on bed.
6 -> Nice recovery options, Its got an ASSIST and WEB, button along side power button. ASSIST button takes you straight to recovery options from bios, there on you can recover your laptop to factory settings etc. While WEB button takes you to a fatory linux installation, which boots up in seconds in case you want to browse web instantly.
7 -> Multi Touch Touch Pad, its got an extremely nice touch pad, it works with 2-3 or more fingers. The whole pad is clickable, if you decide to upgrade to windows 8 (which you should), the multi finger swype, and scrolling and other tasks become heavily easier. Infact its impossible for me use a laptop without one now.
8 -> Battery life, Its incredible for its performance, you can watch 4 movies on one charge and it barely takes any time to charge, infact i remember charging it over 33% in a matter of half an hour.
CONS :-
To be honest there aren't many
1 -> Sometimes the track pad would stop responding to multi finger gestures under intense CPU pressure.(No, I dont really know why.)
2 -> Some times, random particles would slide under keys, which are impossible to remove. They make key feedback awful.
3 -> The laptop is strong, but as i mentioned it lacks mono-cog design, which means there are tiny openings between the joints, which doesn't look good.
In all, its a very good purchase, it seems like it would last for ever on me, without any problems.
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Acer Aspire V3-571-53218G75Makk
by TheSpaceBetween2
was needing a new laptop prior to Christmas as my Sony Vaios screen was occasionally having problems with lines on it. So I decided to look around for a laptop, after comparing processor scores, hard drive capacity and memory I decided to go with the Acer Aspire V3-571 G as it had the best balance between all features with the second ... fastest i5 processor inside it but also boasting a healthy 8gb of ram and unique at this price point (of just sub 500 pounds), was that it contained a dedicated 2GB VRAM graphics card, it also has quite a large screen for a laptop (15.6 inch screen) so all in all I decided this would be the one that would give me the best chance of being able to have many software instruments loaded in a music app whilst still keeping the buffer size and hence latency (delay between pressing a key and hearing it) below 256 samples and thus not detectable to the human ear.
I bought the laptop from simplyacer.com, on the strength of online reviews, and that also seems to have been a good decision as the delivery was prompt and it was delivered when they promised.
MultiTasking
So having given a bit of background to my thought process behind picking it I Will now describe how it actually performs, and that is actually pretty amazing, I can have a youtube video playing music in one tab, I can have multiple tabs open on paid to click websites just letting their timer run down, I can be downloading something from youtube and playing a game all at the same time with very little lag on my computer, and this is just unreal, I can even have some music app open and get performance better than on my old sony vaio computer when it was set up specificially for music (i.e wirless/Bluetooth drivers off, internet security off). What is amazing is that my security (Bullgaurd) is quite bulky and would slow most computers down but not this, I know this because windows told me Bull Guard was slowing start up times, yet when the computer is loaded this bulky program seems not to make to much difference
===Digital Audio Workstation Performance===
Provided I have no internet on I can mostly get a sample rate of 112 samples (thus very low latency) even with multiple synths and effects loaded up, however the computer can struggle with badly behaving synths and I have to really bump the buffer rate up to 600 samples or so, but this appears to be caused by badly behaving synths more than anything else, so far I have not needed to disable bullgaurd, switch of my wifi driver or Bluetooth driver but these are always options along with further reducing the paging file or using a flash drive instead of the hard drive for caching. Some apps themselves give poorer performance, magix is a big one, which seems to, as a product, have never got back to its early days of being a product that could run on modest computers, these days magix products seem to always want i7 or whatever is the top end processor of the day, whereas far more professional daws can get buy on i5 processors or less. I'd say it at present I am exstatic with the performance of my computer and the sound card is stronger than the Sony Vaio and the speaker is quite impressive for a laptop and produces decent and clear volume althoug you would still want to hook up ur laptop to powered speakers for more power, one slight negative is that in order to accomodate the the thin long speaker on this laptop, they had to remove the lights that tell u if caps locks are on and off etc so now the indication comes on screen which means you can forget if you are currently using CAPS OR NOT!
==Graphics Performance==
The first thing about this computer that blew me away was the resolution of the graphics on the acer games portal, just beautiful clear and deep. I have not tested any pc games like crisis yet as I am not one for spending much on video games but the free beta of the game "kings road" was pretty impressive with a high quality graphic (by web based games standards) being played with zero lag and also with lots of other program windows open in the background, and this was with my computer set to prefer "background services" rather than programs. Again it seems very strong, well with 2 gb dedicated graphics it should be (hence the G in the name).
Extras:
My computer came with a HD web cam (much better than the only acceptable VGA resolution of my Sony Vaio) and also 1TB of hard drive estate instead of the 750GB listed here, this was a simply acer exclusive. I have not used the webcam yet, however when I figure out how to remove backgrounds and faces from pictures I may use this to upload video reviews synced to text 2 speech programs, but I will only learn this when I get time as I spend my life dipping into and out of different hobbies. It also has 3 USB ports, 2 are standard USB2 but one is USB 3 making this laptop quite future proof, but as with any laptop the biggest thing that is not future proof is the processor, although the i5 processor in this computer should not be much below average in 4 or 5 years time, instead of the above average power it posses just now. The optical disk drive spins very fast and makes a lot of noise which I guess could be a problem when watching a dvd but is great when burning a disk or accesing data from cd/dvd-rom.
Finally there is a multi card reader and this is a lovely little feature that makes transfering to and from SD cards very easy and saves money and space on external accessories for this task
===Summary===
A thoroughly good value computer than has higher average stats than of most laptops several hundred pounds dearer, sure it might not have an i7 processor but i5 seems sufficient and those i7 processors won't have 8g of ram or 2g dedicated graphics unless your rich and can spend 1.5 k on a computer! Only serious negative is the sensitivity of the keys and track pad which seem to jump a lot when typing as they respond to the slightest preasure.
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