Acer Aspire E 15 ES1-511-C590 Laptop for $250

My Acer Aspire ES1 Review

I’ve used this laptop for a couple of weeks. Here are some impressions.

Price – Priced at only $250, the Acer Aspire ES1 is one of the cheapest notebooks on the market at the time of this writing.

Performance – Currently, the Acer Aspire ES1 is available only with the Intel Celeron N2830 processor. It is one of the slowest laptop processors on the market, but is usable for everyday tasks. Detailed performance test can be found here: http://laptoping.com/intel-celeron-n2830-n2820-specs-benchmark.html . Actually, the CPU isn’t the bottleneck of the system. The hard drive at 5,400rpm is. The slowdowns I occasionally encountered were because of the HDD, not the CPU or RAM.

Design and build quality – With a profile of 0.9″ and weight of about 4.7 pounds, Acer’s ES1 is more portable than the average budget 15.6-incher measuring about 1.3″ high and weighing in at more than 5 pounds. In fact, it’s one of the slimmest and lightest 15.6-inch notebooks on the market. With its dimensions, weight and shape, the laptop resembles $1000+ ultrabooks. The ES1 is made of plastics. The LCD lid and keyboard deck do wobble if you apply a firm pressure, but that’s expected for a budget plastic notebook. During typing, you won’t notice bending of the surrounding area of the keyboard. The finish feels durable. It’s matte black with a dotted pattern. Unlike the glossy cases on some other notebook models, this one doesn’t attract fingerprints much and is easy to keep clean. The hinges hold the display firmly in place.

Display – The screen on the ES1 is just another 15.6-incher with 1366×768 pixel count. It doesn’t have IPS display technology found on the premium-class notebooks, so you can’t expect wide viewing angles nor a great color accuracy provided by IPS. However, as it is, there are no big flaws screen-wise. It is quite bright, so you can comfortably put the brightness settings in Windows to 50-70% percent to preserve the battery life and still having good visibility in indoor environments during the day. At night and in dim rooms, you’ll probably want to dial brightness down anyway, because the panel might be too bright for comfortable viewing in that scenario. Backlight bleeding on the edges of the screen is minimal, although slightly more visible on the bottom edge.

Keyboard and trackpad – The keyboard keys have a longer travel than average. Therefore, tactile feedback is better than on the majority of laptops available today, which usually have very shallow keyboards. My side-by-side tests against some of the competing notebooks – namely the Lenovo G50, HP Pavilion 15, Dell Inspiron 3000, and the older Acer Aspire E1 series, confirmed that. The isle-style keys are well spaced and I haven’t encountered excessive errors or any other problems while typing. Absence of the dedicated numeric pad (which can be a downside for users entering large amounts of numeric data), enabled a more centered position of the keyboard, which is another plus. Also, I have no complaints regarding the clean keyboard layout. You can check it yourself it in the image gallery below the review. Nothing much to say about the trackpad, since I’m actually a hard-case mouse user. Left and right clicks on the trackpad worked without an issue, as well as the multitouch surface itself. Clicking is well optimized, it’s not too soft nor too stiff.

Temperature and noise – The Acer Aspire ES1 is one of the quietest and coolest notebooks I’ve ever used. Since the Intel Celeron N2830 “Bay Trail” processor in the tested configuration is among the best when it comes to energy efficiency, it doesn’t consume much power and therefore doesn’t produce excessive amounts of heat. This makes the laptop run very cool and enabled use of a smallish cooling system, which is very quiet. The CPU fan is almost inaudible in normal use. Under heavy stress, it kicks in at a greater speed only for short periods of time and even then it isn’t loud by no means. Operating temperature of the included N2830 CPU was between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius.

Battery life – The notebook delivered 5 hours and 15 minutes long battery life in my web surf test. That’s quite good for a 15.6-inch notebook, especially considering this one has a a small 3-cell 3220mAh battery. The test involves screen brightness set to 50% (still bright enough for web surfing during the day) and auto-refreshing of three web pages opened in tabs in Chrome browser via Wi-Fi. The first one was a 2-minute YouTube video clip in 480p resolution, which reloaded every 10 minutes. The second and third pages were an article on CNN.com and a Google Search page, both refreshing every 3 minutes.

Speakers – Weak and down-firing, located on the bottom of the chassis. They can’t produce any bass, while highs are quite muted because of the location.

Audio jack on the back – Putting two USBs, HDMI, power jack, and LAN port on the back is a good solution, since it reduces cable clutter on the desk, but I don’t like having the audio port on the back. I often plug headphones in and out and the jack location makes it quite inaccessible for easy plugging in / out.

No easy hardware upgrades – RAM, hard drive, battery are all sealed inside. I haven’t opened it, but I’ve read some reports saying the HDD can be accessed directly after removing the bottom panel by unscrewing about 10 screws, while RAM is on the opposite side of the motherboard and thus hard to reach.

No DVD drive – The model I tested and the Acer Aspire ES1-511-C590 (same specs on both) had no DVD drive, but some other ES1 Acer configurations will maybe have one.

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