Acer Aspire ES1-512-C1PW Very Affordable 15.6″ Laptop

The Acer Aspire ES1-512-C1PW is one of the cheapest laptops on the market. It doesn’t lack in screen size and data storage and system memory departments like similarly priced alternatives, since it has a 15.6-inch display, 4GB RAM, and a 500GB hard drive.

The Acer Aspire ES1-512-C1PW is well suited for the basic computing tasks, but not much more than that. It is based on the Intel Celeron N2840 “Bay Trail” dual-core chip at 2.16GHz, which can serve well for web browsing, multimedia playback, office applications, and some casual gaming under pre-installed Windows 10 operating system. You can find more about the Celeron N2840 in this review.

The screen specifications are mediocre, but usual for budget-class notebooks. Its resolution is 1366-by-768 pixels, it lacks IPS for wide viewing angles, and there’s no touch support.

The keyboard has chiclet style keys and a dedicated numeric pad, but no key backlight. The trackapad features integrated left and right click buttons.

Furthermore, the ES1-512-C1PW features stereo speakers, a basic VGA-quality web camera, one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI video out, Wi-Fi and Ethernet LAN Internet connectivity, Bluetooth, and a multi-format media card reader. This model stands out from the crowd with its rear location of the majority of ports.

All parts are wrapped in a sleek and utilitarian-looking matte black plastic chassis with a 0.9″ profile. The notebook weighs in at 5.2 pounds. A downside is a lack of user-removeable bottom cover and component upgrades are not allowed.

The ES1-512-C1PW model belongs to the Acer Aspire E 15 ES1 series, released back in 2014. We reviewed an identical model hardware-wise last year, which had Windows 8.1 as the only difference. The conclusion was that the notebook has a decent build quality, an average screen with good brightness and acceptable viewing angles, typing experience better than on competing systems thanks to a good key travel, and a pleasant trackpad. The laptop is characterized by quiet and cool operation, but also somewhat muted sound due to the bottom-side speakers location. The battery can last around five hours while browsing the web via Wi-Fi.