Acer Aspire E1-510-2500

The Acer Aspire E1-510-2500 is one of the cheapest laptops on the market. Only select Chromebook ultraportables are cheaper than it, but keep in mind that the E1-510-2500 offers full-blown Windows PC experience on a standard 15.6-inch display. Acer obviously had to cut some corners in order to deliver the exceptional price, but the laptop is still a fully functional machine. Although the included Intel Celeron N2820 processor features four cores, it’s still just a entry-level chip. It can be used for web surfing and office document editing, as well as audio and video playback, including 1080p videos. If you throw anything more than that on the E1-510-2500 (i.e. video editing, professional photo editing, 3D gaming) the basic nature of the N2820 will be far more noticeable and you’ll experience sluggish performance. For these tasks, you should go for a laptop with Intel Core series processors and dedicated graphics cards, but these are at least twice pricier than the Acer. 4GB of RAM memory included won’t be a bottleneck for sure for all routine computing tasks, while the 500GB hard drive is averagely sized. Also, the screen resolution is mediocre just like on all budget laptops with 1366-by-768 pixel count.

Unfortunately, optical drive is missing, but on the positive side, the notebook is fairly thin, with a profile measuring 1″ high. The weight of 5.2 pounds is average for the category.

The Acer Aspire E1-510-2500 has a full-size keyboard with numeric pad. There’s a four-cell battery, but we have no info on battery life. It should be decent, since the included CPU is one of the most power efficient PC processors on the market. The laptop has stereo speakers, web camera, three USBs, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Ethernet LAN connections, a multiformat media card reader, and HDMI video connector. Overall, all necessary features for the home and office user are provided, but if you want a bit better processor speed and a built-in DVD burner for the same price, you can check out the Toshiba C55D-A5120.