Features:

  • 8th Generation Intel Core i3-8130U Processor (Up to 3.4GHz)
  • 15.6" Full HD (1920 x 1080) widescreen LED-lit Display
  • 6GB Dual Channel Memory, 1TB HDD & 8x DVD
  • Up to 13.5-Hours of battery life
  • Windows 10 Home
Probably the most bang for your buck under$400

USB 3.0, USB-C, 1080 screen, 1TB HDD, no sacrifice in CPU age/gen (8th gen i3) and no hot & hungry AMD. I shopped Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Amazon and eBay. Over several weeks many deals came and went but this was still a better deal for what it has. No need for a giant battery, though at 20% brightness I'm still nowhere near the 12hr battery life. Maybe closer to 8 hrs, after streaming video (not only streaming video but casting to the TV too). All in all, you don't need a bigger name brand with a bigger price tag, they all use the same companies for each component and Acer isn't going to be any less quality than Samsung Dell or HP. At least it's not a garbage Chromebook for the sub 400 pricetag either. Very happy with this after a few days. Just be sure to uninstall any and all bloatware from Acer, for the love of God remove Norton (go Bitdefender Free) and you'll have much better performance!!!

Nice

I’m not the most tech savvy person on earth. My old PC was starting to become unreliable, and I knew I needed to replace it before it died. I did a bit of comparison shopping on Amazon, and decided on this Acer. It has lots of space and is fast enough for me. I do not play games on this laptop, so I don’t know anything about graphics, etc. I feel I got a great laptop for the price, and it suits my simple needs.

Fantastic budget laptop In need of a simple drive upgrade

Fantastic product. This laptop is a step up from the previous product which only had the skylake 6 series. The 8th gen processor handles some really impressive things for the price. The only thing is that pesky 5400rpm hard drive. Simply buy a 2.5” ssd and a Sata to USB adapter. Plug the drive into the pc and use macrium reflect to copy the drive as soon as the computer is set up. Then pop out the old drive and insert the new ssd. It blows even my aging desktop out of the water. Even without a discreet card the graphics are impressive. It easily outputs 4K with less than 50% draw on integrated graphics. Although it might be limited for rendering and such. My biggest qualm is that the older model had a backlit keyboard that was great. I would have gladly paid 400 for this laptop if it only had that backlighting. As far as budget laptops go this acer is fantastic.

Solid product

Very happy-shipping was prompt & product worked out of the box.--have only had small issues w/Windows 10, after experience w/Windows7 & Chrome (wife still prefers Chrome) Wehave found Cortana the voice Assistant to be very helpful, when neither of us thought it would matter. Screen picture quality is fine-really don't know what people expect, especially at under $400.. SOUND IS WAY BETTER THAN EXPECTED, & WE BOTH LOVE OUR MUSIC.. Everything works & is well laid out. The speed is like greased lightning, compared to our old equipment I appreciate the ease of serviceability offer by Acer on the bottom-only 3 screws. On the downside : it took us about 2 weeks to remove almost all the "bloatware", once we knew what some of them were-we kept very little. Simply too much time was involved here & would appreciate a cut of at least 50%. Even tho we don't need it yet, we would have appreciated 2 gb more ram, & a backlit keyboard.-we would have been willing to pay more! I am 69 & the wife is 62-and we are NOT techies, but folks who consider a computer to be a necessary evil/

Easily upgradable including the Bios. This is NOT a Gaming Laptop!

Very easy to upgrade to make a very fast laptop. I used Macrium Reflect Free (easy to find on the net) to clone the slow HDD to a Adata SU800 M.2 2280 256GB SSD. I replaced the 6GB Ram provided (1x4GB + 1x2GB) with 2x4GB Crucial DDR3L 1600mhz Ram sticks. There are 3 screws on the bottom to remove to access both. A piece of cake. One note; when I first started the laptop back up after replacing the Ram, it wouldn't boot up. I then swapped the old Ram back in and it booted fine. I could not find an answer for this online so I just tried swapping the new Ram back in again. It worked this time! I held down the power button until it booted. Everthing is fine now. It boots up in about 5 sec. Also, when you boot it up for the first time after cloning the HDD, it will automatically boot to the SSD. To get into Bios just press F2 and hold as soon as you see the Acer logo when booting up. There is new Firmware for the Bios at the Acer website and also fixes for the Intel chip hacks (Specter and Meltdown). You should probably do these ASAP.

Not for gamers or those into massive amounts of high speed surfing, but perfect for us old farts just wanting to dabble

Writing this review on this machine. I needed a machine that would allow me to work with my personal photos, music files and of coarse the internet. I don't venture into gaming so I didn't need a processor that could outrun the speed of light and I'm not a DJ or professional photographer. So this machine is much better than what I had. My only dislike is the way Microsoft tries to tell you how and what you will run on Windows10 rather than letting the user make that choice. Otherwise great battery life and fast charging. Very quick boot up and shut down. And the size to weight ratio is even better than I thought.

Exceeds expectations for the price

Bought this as a gift for my dad.. he just needed something to surf the web and play videos. I bought this along with a 256GB ADATA SSD ($55) that I immediately installed with no issues. The panel at the back has 3 screws that need to be removed and has a notch on one side that can be used to pry it open, it requires a little pressure to pop out but not too much. You will find a m.2 slot to pop in a SATA3 ssd. The retaining screw is included. Once the SSD is installed you need to go into disk management (Start > type "Disk Management") and format the new SSD drive as NTFS and it will assign a drive letter etc. After that plug in a USB flash drive and download Windows 10. I created installable media on the USB flash drive, then went into the BIOS (press F2 at the Acer logo) and changed the boot order to USB, restart and follow the prompts to install on the new SSD. When you are ready to reboot remove the USB and it will boot into the new Win10 on the SSD, you may get a menu that gives you the option to choose the boot drive. To remove the mutliple boot options start msconfig (Start > type "Msconfig") Boot tab and delete the HDD boot option. Then you can reformat the HDD. Quick observations - Display - I think it's fine, has classic TN panel issues but that is fully expected at this price point. If you're looking at the display head on then it has a nice picture, brightness is average but overall it's acceptable. For an entry level laptop I would say the Display is acceptable. Pics of direct and off angle are attached in low light indoors conditions. HDD - Do not even think of using this laptop with the supplied HDD, it is a slow as hell... using an SSD makes the performance increase about 1000% so the only way I would use this is with installing an SSD. The boot time with the HDD is about 1-2 minutes, with an SSD it's about 5-7 seconds so I make my point!!! The Crystal Diskmark scores for the SSD and HDD are attached to see the difference. Trackpad - I just use an external mouse, my favorite is the M187 wireless from Logitech, mini mouse that costs $10... I hate all trackpads even on laptops that cost 4 times the price of this so just get an external mouse. Build quality - I would say that it is really nice, a bit flimsy may be but laptops are all flimsy, I have a $1000 surface that I don't think I would want to test it's toughness by dropping it so I think it's silly to debate toughness on a laptop, they are all relatively delicate - the Acer is well put together and looks nice. Battery life - pretty great, I got about 8 hours of continuous use which is phenomenal. Given the price this is a crazy good deal and most definitely exceeds expectations.

Change the HDD to an SSD!

For the price, it's a great college laptop. Student programs like Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Mail all run without issue thanks to the 8th gen Intel CPU. It delivered snappy desktop performance (when I changed the HDD) and has up-to-date ports (like the USB-C port). If I could recommend one thing, it would be to change the HDD to an SSD. Then, you would get rid of the bottleneck that is the cheap accompanied hard disk drive. Not only was it slow and choppy, it was also making louder-than-normal reading noise. Replacing it to a 240GB SSD solved all my problems. When buying this laptop you need to promise yourself to not play any intensive games. It doesn't have an integrated GPU. I learned this the hard way. But it's fine since I already own a gaming PC, and it's a good thing too since I won't play games while in the university library instead of studying like I should be :) The trackpad is sort of sticky and doesn't have a slippy film that helps with finger movement. With higher temperatures and sweatier fingers, it can be a little annoying. A cheap wireless mouse, however, remedies this. The screen has severe light bleed but I didn't expect any better. It hurts my eyes in my dark room but in the uni library it doesn't make a difference For my use case: 8/10. It lost a few points since I had to buy a 50$ SSD to replace the slow HDD. However, I love it in every other aspect: I don't need an integrated GPU, and it sells for a great price for college students. Go for it if you only intend to study/send emails/browse the web. Remember, it NEEDS an SSD, or at least a faster HDD.

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