Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver)

• Intel Core i7-3517U 1.9 GHz (4 MB Cache)
• 8 GB SDRAM
• 500 GB 5400 rpm Hard Drive
• 11.6-Inch Screen, Intel HD Graphics 4000
• Windows 8, 5-hour battery life

To start, I own a lot of Acer products. Every year or so, I tend to inch along in my needs and feelings for laptops. Prior to purchasing this, I had an 10" Acer Aspire One netbook which I was thrilled about and a 14" Acer Aspire Timeline. I was hoping that this machine would sort of be the bridge between the things that I really liked about a Netbook (light, good battery life, very portable, and low heat) and the performance of my more beefy laptop (higher resolution, better video performance, etc).

I have to say that in many ways this meets my needs and in some others it didn't quite live up to my expectations. To start with, though, I will first say that I am pleased with this notebook, overall. I am not going to blame the product for having Windows 8 which is at times obnoxious and counter-intuitive because the product description clearly says it comes with windows 8. Some people are not going to like it though. I'd suggest you try to navigate around Windows 8 sometime with a mouse in a store if you want a feel for the experience. Everyone's going to differ on whether they think this is one step forward and two back, or the other way around. What I will say is, for what Windows 8 is, this thing flies through it and it displays everything in a slick manner.

This has had no problems running Netflix, not that you would expect it to. It can do all your normal computing, and the easy app stuff they seem to be trying to turn windows into. On top of that, this isn't a great system to play games on, but it can run the games that I have played with respectable stability. I routinely play World of Tanks on mine with middle-of-the-road type graphics, and I'm very satisfied with the mid-20's to mid-30's frames per second. If you pump it as high as it goes (or as high as it lets you) you will see the frame rate drop though to a humanly noticeable level. The same can be said for Skyrim.

Some of the things that aren't measured in the specs that you might want to be aware of. This can get rather hot. If you are doing anything complicated, this could be come a 'not-on-my-lap laptop.' If you're just playing with the internet, it usually seems to be fine. If, like I mentioned above, you're playing a game, definitely set it down somewhere else. Also, this is the first Acer that I've purchased where the sound that comes with the computer is noticeably bad. The speakers that are in this sound tinny and hollow. If you are planning on playing music, this would probably force you to headphones or a separate speaker system. I carry around an 'X-Mini II Capsule Speaker,' which is quite nice for what it is, so I can plug that in if I need pretty or more noises for whatever reason.

Buy Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver) Now

No question...great performance. The VGA and HDMI ports support two monitors very well on this and all the other notebooks. The NEW Acer site allows a very smooth compare of the complex mix of features. Fortunately Amazon has the right stock.

Read Best Reviews of Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver) Here

I needed to replace my work notebook; I had previously purchased an Acer Timeline X series in the same 11.6" form factor and it has done fairly well throughout its two-year run with me around the world (literally) other than a few niggling problems.

I had a budget of about $1,500, so I was considering the Asus Zenbook Prime in the same form factor, but I couldn't find one with the 256GB SSD. Moreover, it didn't have a full-sized SD card slot and didn't come with the old-school VGA port (this was important because many of the customers I visit do not have projectors with HDMI inputs). I finally decided that for the price, I would buy the Acer V5 because it had the same processor (Ivy bridge Core i7) and double the RAM of the Asus (8GB vs. 4GB).

It seems that the minor problems with the last notebook have been addressed and it is exceedingly fast. The only complaint is that I'm still adapting to the touchpad with integrated buttons as my last one had dedicated buttons. However, with the money I saved, I decided to buy a 256GB SSD for the computer (be sure to get one that is 7mm high most of them are 9mm and will not fit inside the chassis) and used Acronis True Image to clone the drive...wow. Screaming fast performance that takes about 15 seconds to go from completely powered off to booted and about 4 seconds to go from sleep to booted. Apps open almost instantaneously...and I still have about $500 left in the budget to buy more stuff!

A quick word to those of you that put an SSD in the device using Acronis: I used a USB enclosure to turn the SSD drive into a flash drive in order to do the cloning. I spent a couple of hours trying to clone and the only way it worked for me was when I created a bootable flash drive with Acronis and then changed the BIOS's settings from UEFI to LegacyBoot (otherwise the BIOS won't let you boot to Acronis' Linux image). The cloning takes about an hour and then you can swap the HDD and SSD. Once you swap the drives, you need to change the BIOS back to UEFI or it won't boot Windows 8. Good luck!

Want Acer Aspire V5-171-9661 11.6-Inch Laptop (Silky Silver) Discount?

As the owner of an 11.6" Acer Aspire One AO722, this looks the same but with a much faster CPU, a better graphics processor, a lot more memory and a USB 3.0 port, all of which the One could use I added RAM and an SSD to mine and makes this laptop of potential interest. OTOH, given that it comes with Windows 8 I was wondering about the screen, i.e., whether it is a touchscreen. Although reaching out to a touchscreen is not very functional when the laptop is more than about a half an arm's length away (elbow-to-fingers), in closer, such as on one's lap, it could work well.

At the Acer site, the graphic shows someone touching the screen and the text below, under a "Touch to go" headline, reads "The Aspire V5 Series features slimmed-down mobile convenience in your choice of 11.6", 14.0" and 15.6" display sizes -including models with 10-point touchscreens!" Since that's a little ambiguous and Amazon doesn't indicate a touchscreen, I called Acer support. According to the rep (India) who went and checked to be sure, this model does *not* come with a touchscreen. He also mentioned something about some consistency problems between the touchpad and Win 8, but I didn't pursue it. The other thing to note is the advertised 5-hour battery life. As laptops go, I suppose that's borderline acceptable and in the range of the Aspire One. But realistically, manufacturer battery specs are usually inflated, thus something in the 4-hour range seems more reasonable to expect. A review of the 15.6" 6869 model found 4h12m. That wouldn't be so good.