GADGET REVIEW.... Acer Aspire 5 TOO MANY WRONGS

GADGET REVIEW

Acer Aspire 5

TOO MANY WRONGS

Acer Aspire 5 is not exactly a new laptop. The series was announced last April but at the time, it came with Intel’s 7th generation processors. Acer chose the Aspire 5 to be amongst the first for the 8th generation refresh. The machine has a focus on multimedia and comes with an impressive set of specifications for the price.

To start with, we appreciate the design. Even though it has allplastic constructions, the patterned top lid, brushed metal palm rest and silver highlights on the trackpad give it a premium appearance. The easy access doors underneath (for RAM and hard drive upgrades) are quite rare now but always welcome. You get a full-size keyboard with keys that have good travel and are even backlit (though its just backlight on or off). In terms of ports, Acer has generously included a USB Type-C port, full size HDMI output, SD card reader, Ethernet and three USB ports. That being said, only one of the USB ports is the faster USB 3.0 type. At this price, at least two ports should be the USB 3.0 type.

The 15.6-inch screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels keeps everything sharp. The screen has an anti-glare coating which helps in minimizing reflections. We like the screen, even though it comes the old-school thick bezels. It’s nice that you can open the screen 180 degrees — the hinge holds fast at any angle. Brightness levels are excellent, but the biggest failing of the screen — the one thing that takes away from all the good — is poor viewing angles. You’ll get the best colours and readability only at a specific angle (give or take 5 degrees). This is quite unacceptable at this price.

As for specs, the Aspire 5 has an 8th gen Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, Nvidia GeForce MX150 GPU with 2GB VRAM and a 1TB 5,400rpm hard drive. The hard drive is a bottleneck for performance but the other components don’t seem to play nice with each other other. Apps take way too much time to launch, over 60% of memory is consumed by just a single web browser tab and it struggles with multi-tasking. The consumption of resources is also one of the reason why the laptop tends to get warm even with basic usage. One of the potential reasons for this is the number of background processes running thanks to Acer’s preloaded bloatware. Battery life is about 4 hours which is again less than what we expected. Some of the things that impressed us include the speaker output, large responsive trackpad and the compact charger. Then again the webcam is quite the dud and there’s just so much bloatware on it.

Acer has typically impressed us with its range of laptops be it for everyday use or gaming. However, this particular Aspire 5 has to be one of their worst offerings. Even with seemingly good specifications, the laptop struggles with performance right out of the box. There are cheaper options from Lenovo, HP and Dell that offer similar specifications and better performance that you should consider.

Karan.Bajaj

ET19MAR18